CONFESSIONS OF A PUPPETMASTER: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES BAND

Charles Band’s new memoir, Confessions of a Puppetmaster, releases on November 16th. Image courtesy of William Morrow.

In the world of horror and exploitation films, there’s few that could say they’ve had the monumental highs and the rock-bottom lows as master of Grindhouse cinema, Charles Band has. A renowned producer, director, and media mogul, Band has amassed a catalog of over 360 films to his credit as a producer and director, including such cult classics as GHOULIES, TOURIST TRAP, and of course, the PUPPET MASTER franchise. 

His new memoir, Confessions of a Puppetmaster: A Hollywood Memoir of Ghouls, Guts, and Gonzo Filmmaking is set to be released on November 16, 2021 from William Morrow. In it, Band chronicles his childhood in Rome where his father worked in the film industry, to his days turning out Lovecraft adaptations, vampire films, and sci-fi movies, and ultimately to the creation of his Full Moon film company empire, which currently shoots at least one film a month, and releases a new two-part feature film every month through FullMoonFeatures.com.

I was fortunate to sit down recently with Charles for my podcast, The Horror Files (available on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Audible) and ask him about the guts, gore, and glory that has been his 40-year career. The following is an adapted transcript of our conversation.

Your memoir, Confessions of a Puppetmaster is coming out November 16th - why did you decide to write one now?

Well, it started last year during the pandemic. We're incredibly busy. This coming year, we have 20 features planned. So, you never know when to stop and tell your story. But since last year, things have slowed down even though we kept making some movies, kind of in this fortuitous way. A literary agent said, “Hey, I think HarperCollins would love to publish your memoirs. You have such an interesting story. I could connect you with a biographer,” since I could tell the stories, but I'm not a writer. So I spent about five months every Saturday with Adam Felber who did a great job just remembering all the all the stories in the history, because I'm so forward thinking it's like, that's all I'm focused on is tomorrow, and the new movies and promotions. Rarely do I look back, but I’ve had a pretty bizarre, colorful life. So we did that, and it’s now on presale and will come out in a few weeks.

You got into the horror world early and were an entrepreneur at a young age. How did you get into the movie-making business?

Well, I was lucky in that I literally grew up on a movie set. I mean, my dad was a producer and director. He took the family when we were really young, my brother and I - when I was four - to Europe. He thought, well, you know, maybe Paris, because he was born in Paris, and he had connections there. And he promised us kids, we’ll be gone for a year, and then you'll come back to your friends and about a year later, Paris wasn't working out. He said, Well, Rome is the place to be. He had friends there that were really doing a lot of work. So he said, let's give it a try. And that was 12 more years. So I basically grew up in Italy. 

So I grew up on a movie set. And I just found a love for sci-fi, fantasy and horror films. You know, I was exposed to a strange mix of great 60s music and some Marvel Comics - the early pre-superhero, Marvel Comics - and amazing Italian cinema. For people who can't imagine it, there was no internet, no ability to see any movie at will. Basically, there was no television back then in Italy. So it was really kind of a diet of movies and the few comics I could find and some great music and then a lot of ambition. And then it just happened.

You spent so much time in your early years pounding the pavement, trying to get anybody you could to finance your films. What was your first real big break?

I sort of made my own break, because unlike others who, I mean, I knew the technical side, my dad had me working on the sets. He had me apprentice doing just about every job, even some crappy jobs. So I knew that part of it. And I also knew that I wanted to be like Roger Corman.  I wanted to make exploitation movies. I didn't want to wait around and submit scripts and be beholden to others. I'm kind of not built that way. So, even as a young kid, I did a bunch of crazy projects, entrepreneurial things in Rome. I opened a club at 15 years old that they shut down a week later, because of lacking things like permits and also my age.  

We got back to the States when I was 20, and basically, there was no money.  My dad had a great stretch, and then we fell on hard times. So I invented a basically a gift item business and at a young age made a bunch of money and thought, ‘okay, it's gonna make it harder to start making movies.’ Then I began my role of making films.  I made a thousand mistakes and I didn't go to a business school. I didn't know anything except I knew how to make a movie and I knew what I wanted to do, and you live and learn and live and learn.

I seem to be doing that even now for more than four decades. But I made movies that did well. And then I made my first movie where I distributed myself, which was a big deal, a movie called GHOULIES with a really crazy campaign of a ghoulie popping out of the toilet, which pissed off a lot of parents. They were trying to potty train their kids, and that did not help. So you know, I just haven't stopped it. I slowed down only last year, because it was time to sort of remember all these stories, you know, dating back to being babysat by Marilyn Monroe. I mean, the arc is endlessly entertaining.

CHARLES BAND. Image courtesy of HarperCollins.

You’ve been able to be a part of some incredible films like ‘TOURIST TRAP’ and ‘RE-ANIMATOR’. What have your experiences with making films been like?

I've made hundreds of movies. So that's two you plucked out, but the ones I'm more well known for is the PUPPET MASTER features - we've made twelve PUPPET MASTER films, SUBSPECIES, TRANCERS, GHOULIES, FROM BEYOND, TROLL - all those movies and then, more recently, another very successful franchise is EVIL BONG.  We've made THE GINGERDEAD MAN with Gary Busey as a pissed-off cookie. And then, of course, to make it even weirder, we did a show called GINGERDEAD MAN VS EVIL BONG. 

I was lucky to be around during the birth of home video and home video stores popped up all over the country. For many years, that's how people saw my movies and other films. We were lucky that the label Full Moon had a good reputation. For a while we were making one movie every four weeks, which was a lot back in the day before technology made it easier.

You really got in on the ground floor of the VHS business. There weren’t a lot of people doing that at the time. 

No, no. Well, I mean, I had the first. Sometimes being the first isn’t the best. I had the first independent video company - I was literally six months after that business was born. No one else was doing that. Except for Andrew Blay who's considered the godfather of the video business. When they announced the Betamax machine, oh my God, it was like science fiction in the 70s. You could record a show on television, but there were a lot of bugs. And Andrew Blay was very smart and recognized that people were gonna want to buy movies too. So he made a deal with 20th Century Fox - this is video lore history - and licensed 20 movies for a million dollars from 20th Century Fox in ‘77 or ‘78. So, when you went to Sears to buy your Betamax machine, which you could only buy a huge Ben Cartwright carved console. Next to it there was a rack where you could buy THE FRENCH CONNECTION for $49.95. I've been a collector of everything and I thought, oh my god, this is the coolest thing ever. So, I went out and I immediately started licensing well-known exploitation movies of that era, like GROOVE TUBE and TUNNEL VISION and eventually BOOGEYMAN, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, HALLOWEEN, and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. I built up a really good business as video was expanding, and that’s what really turned the video into something huge, because it wasn't the beginning. 

You know, $49.95 even today seems like a lot of money, and back then it was a lot of money. So they weren't selling too many of these $50 VHS copies of THE FRENCH CONNECTION, but how many times can you watch THE FRENCH CONNECTION? (laughs) But then the rental part of that suddenly happened, and there was controversy because in the beginning, the studios didn't want that to happen. They thought ‘well, how can we benefit or monetize a store buying THE FRENCH CONNECTION and renting it a hundred times for three or four bucks?’ They eventually lost that battle, and it was to their benefit, because that really exploded the home video business. Those video stores would buy all these movies for $30 or whatever the wholesale price was, put them on their shelves, and then customers would come in and for three or four dollars, rent these movies. and hundreds of them per movie. That's how video stores made money and people got to see movies at will for the first time in history. 

You also got in on the horror video game business (to not so great success) before it became the hugely popular business that it is now. What was that experience like?

Being there in the beginning of a home video, by 1980 I thought, I'm not a big gamer, but I thought horror video games seemed like the right thing to do. That's back when there was only Atari. That's the way you would play a game. And they were pretty simple, prehistoric video games. So I licensed the rights. I already knew the players. I already had the movies licensed for home video. I said, hey, I want to license the video game rights to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and HALLOWEEN, which I did. 

And again, the owners always thought I was crazy. They thought no one's gonna want the video game. But I developed these two video games, but you know, little soundtracks, like HALLOWEEN was [sings electronic HALLOWEEN theme song sound] with the little guy. It was like Pac-Man, you know? It was completely, ridiculously simple. I spent a lot of money doing this, because there was no technology back then. And then they produced, I don't know, 5,000 or 10,000 of them. Maybe not that many. Each of those first three video games went to a big market. That was the right market. We did a lot of publicity and sold nothing. Every retailer was mainly stores like Sears, who said, “you're crazy, these are horrible. Kids want fun. Kids want Pac-Man. They don't want horror video games.” 

We literally dumped most of them, and apparently they now sell for $500 each to collectors. I was even going to do a 3D Frankenstein video game. It’s a bummer when you’re ten or twenty years ahead of yourself.

You’ve given a lot of early breaks to big future Hollywood talents like Helen Hunt, Demi Moore, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Were there any in particular that you knew were going to have a big career ahead of them?

Everyone you mentioned, including Viggo Mortensen - yeah. Hopefully, if you’re in this business and you produce, you direct, you can recognize talent, because you do these auditions and sometimes a hundred people show up, and you're sitting there and now of course, it's a little easier on tape. But nonetheless, it's not even tape. So I'll just say tape. But, I know there’s some really famous people that did come through our casting sessions that we did not hire. Apparently, Brad Pitt came and we didn't want him, and you know, you win some, you lose some. The experience of directing them, to me, was terrific. Directing Demi in her first movie, she was just 20, and I could tell, I just felt like, “wow, this chick’s got everything, including an awesome voice.” Same thing with Helen. Same thing with all of them. There’s others that are maybe not quite as famous that have come through Full Moon that all went on to have big careers, but you look back and go, “well, they did a great job.” I’m so happy they moved on and I can’t afford them anymore.

You’ve recently finished the long-dormant Dave Allen film, ‘THE PRIMEVALS’ - what has that process been like? 

Well, that's a big, long 30-plus year history. It's not quite finished. That was our most expensive film. Shot it in the 90’s, twelve weeks of photography, which is sometimes twelve times what we’re doing now on the smaller shows. Then there were 250 stop-motion animation shots left to do. We planned 18 months, and about 150 of those shots into that 18-month post production period, Dave passed away.

That was around the same time our fortunes turned and we had to get small.  So we packed this amazing movie away, and just two years ago brought out the boxes. We brought it back and did a deal with Chris Endicott, who was Dave's protégé - super talented guy. People who know, know that stop-motion animation is a lost art. I love it. I’m not a big fan of CGI. And now, we’re literally a handful of shots away from the deed being done. So definitely, early, mid-next year at the latest, we’ll have the movie.

There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening and it’s nice that I was early on in the streaming business because Full Moon Features is doing really well. We’re able to do things on our streaming site that most people can’t because I have an endless amount of behind the scenes footage. Sometimes we go live on set - you can go and watch us make a movie - which is kind of rare and cool. I wanted to figure out a way to give everyone this book as a gift. I thought, okay, it’s $25 but let me give it away. I know HarperCollins would be really upset, but I made that offer. What I did was - if you go to FullMoonDirect.com and buy the book - show us proof of purchase, we’ll give you a one-year free subscription to Full Moon Direct, our streaming site, which has almost a thousand movies. You can watch a new movie every night, if you want, which will take you about a year. 

I wanted people to read the book, because it’s a story more than anything else: of being an entrepreneur, of being knocked down many times, good stretches, terrible stretches. But you’ve just gotta keep going if you believe in something. There are a lot of artists out there, I'm sure, listening to this. Whether you're an aspiring filmmaker, musician, or whatever, it is something that deals with the arts and trying to monetize the use (Paramount's favorite word) of your efforts. It's not easy, and today, in a way, access is easier. The tools are less expensive, but still, to build a career and to be able to make enough money to survive is a challenge. But it’s doable, and I think the book is a lot about that.

Do you think that you've learned more in your career from your successes or your missteps?

Only the missteps, and they are endless. The book is full of them. I had no formal training as a filmmaker but I think I had relatively good taste. And I had a lot of passion. I never went to business school, and even though I graduated high school, I never went to college. So I just jumped in. And, you’re going to make stupid mistakes. I mean, there’s a whole separate book I could make just about all the mistakes I’ve made. You live and learn. You don’t want to make them twice. I’m a little more conservative and knowledgeable now. But then again, the whole business is wacky - the security of this business. Now that I’m entering whatever phase I’m entering, I’m still extremely active. We have up to twenty movies planned for next year, which is insane. But I’ve built this library of movies, it’s my body of work. And luckily, I fought hard over many years to keep that library. Yes, not every movie - some are owned by Universal and MGM - but 90% of them I own. And that gave me an advantage when it was time to start a streaming site. I had movies I could put on it and they’re all my movies. I’m lucky that way. I fought for that.

Considering the sheer amount of things you’ve been able to accomplish in your career, is there anything on your bucket list you still want to do?

Well, you know, I’m getting into a really good rhythm of production. Like I’ve said, we have 20 movies planned out in the coming year. That’s a lot of movies. And there's a lot of joy. Especially with new filmmakers, or even people I've worked with before, having a new idea of going to a remote place, making the movie and then shortly thereafter it comes out and we get immediate feedback. That's kind of the world we're in. I'm lucky I have this strange little bubble where I can conceive a movie, get it made, release it on our streaming sites, and then eventually release it on Blu-Ray and DVD, because there's still people who like physical goods. And it's the whole cycle. Sometimes I say it's from concept to collection, and sometimes collection doesn’t happen too well because the world is so difficult right now. 

It was easier for new filmmakers to exist in the direct to video world because it was real money. And if you shipped enough units, you had an invoice, you got paid. Today, they said they call it digital dives, you know, it's not the same business. Hopefully, you make a good movie and people notice it, then all of a sudden, Netflix says they’ll give you five million for your next movie. Everybody wants that outcome. But it's a little different today than it was back in the home video days. Before the video days, it was really tough, because you had to raise just the money to barely make a small movie on 35 millimeter. You couldn't do that in a garage for a couple thousand bucks. You needed a real crew, you needed film, negative processing. So the price of admission was much higher than it is today. You had to convince people, “I can do this. I have the expertise. I know how to direct actors.” It was different. Today, for no money, you could go out and have your friends act, have a pretty good-looking camera, make a faux DVD box, and you’ve made a movie.  

CONFESSIONS OF A PUPPETMASTER will be available on November 16th, 2021 through William Morrow and is now available for presale here.