If you're not familiar with the name, you may have seen his work on over 130 DVD featurettes. David Gregory started his career as one of the founders of Blue Underground UK, who on their Exploited video label released the likes of Bob Clarkıs "Deathdream" and "The Killing of America". Their first original production was a documentary entitled "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth" which is considered by many to be the definitive and final word on the series as nearly everyone involved with the production was interviewed. "The Shocking Truth" brought David to the attention of Bill Lustig who relocated him to LA to become his featurette director for his projects with Anchor Bay and then Blue Underground US. David stayed at BU US for five years, collaborating on the production of all their DVDs, while also producing special features for MPI/Dark Sky, Anchor Bay UK, Warners and others. He recently broke away to co-found new cult DVD label Severin Films and featurette production arm Funhouse Entertainment.
Can
you tell us how you started in the DVD industry?
Formed Blue Underground UK in 97 with my high school friend Carl Daft.
Released a few films like Deranged and
Three On A Meathook on VHS. Entered a losing battle
with the UK censors which culminated with us challenging them over their
insistence on cutting Last House on the Left.
Lost. Before that though Texas Chain Saw Massacre
was getting its first legit video release in many years. We wanted to do
something to tie in with this release. Tried to license
Texas Chainsaw Family Portrait but that didn’t work out.
So we decided to make our own Chain Saw doc. Met Gunnar Hansen at a film
fair near London and he gave me leads to various other Chain Saw related
folk. Got out my credit card and shot the original version of
The Shocking Truth and released it in the UK and so
the ‘making ofs’ began.
How do you come to work at Blue Underground and what were
some of your projects?
I met Bill Lustig in England, having licensed Maniac
and Vigilante off him for UK release. I shot
an interview with him for The Shocking Truth too. He was at the peak of
the Anchor Bay years and asked me to do a featurette on The
Wicker Man. I jumped at the chance. Came out here to LA to
edit it. Bill liked the piece that I’d done so asked me to stay on full
time making Anchor Bay’s featurettes. He formed Blue Underground US at
that point purely as a limited liability company to produce the
featurettes — so called to avoid confusion because I was of course
linked to Blue Underground UK and was producing all the featurettes in
the US and Europe. For Anchor Bay we did about 25 featurettes, the most
significant of which was certainly The Joe Spinell Story. When
Bill had the idea to form his own label he liked the name so seeing as
we were both involved we kept Blue Underground as the name. Now it’s
important to make clear that although I came up with the name and formed
Blue Underground UK before Blue Underground US, the high quality DVD
brand that is “Blue Underground” is definitely thanks to Bill. I can say
I was a key member of the team from inception until last year, but Bill
was the one who put it all together and set the standard for DVD
production which all subsequent labels have had to live up to. As for me
and the documentary work, Bill was pretty much always open to most
featurette ideas thrown his way. Godfathers of Mondo
was the key project for me under the BU US banner. And The
Spaghetti West was cool in that it was a co-production
between IFC and BU which came with all kinds of new and exciting
problems.
Of all the the projects you have worked on, which one was
your favorite project and why?
The
Polanski's for Anchor Bay UK were certainly a highlight (Knife
in the Water, Repulsion, Cul De Sac). Ban The
Sadist Videos 1 and 2 were a lot of fun, also for AB UK,
because we got to hone in on the absurdity of the whole video nasty
thing in England: uninformed politicians, tabloid newspapers, TV talk
show hosts and religious nuts trying to dictate what’s good for the
moral fabric of the country and its children without having the
slightest clue what they’re talking about. This was a subject very close
to our hearts because Carl and I had lived through the nasty era — the
immense freedom of being able to see all kinds of exotic horror fare
during our early high school years, then having it all taken away and
having to endure ridiculous film censorship for the next fifteen or
twenty years. The formation of the black market horror video collecting
community in the UK during this silly time I think ultimately led to the
launching of Blue Underground UK.
You have worked with numerous celebs on projects - Without naming names,
can you tell us some difficulties you have faced?
I’ve faced one or two temperamental actors and actresses — one who was
so uptight she started throwing objects at her maid because she brought
the wrong rings off her dressing table; another for whom Carl traveled
to Paris especially to interview at the last minute then, after the
fact, she decided she didn’t want to be a part of the program after all
so insisted we cut her out. But honestly dealing with the biggest actors
and directors and their quirks pale in comparison to the egocentricity
and ugly temperament and misguided self-importance of one particular low budget filmmaker I
once had to deal with.
While working at Blue Underground, you also did some projects for other
companies, can you tell us about the projects?
A lot of the more interesting featurette projects were for other
companies and were Blue Underground UK productions. Deer
Hunter and Badlands for Warner,
Last House on the Left, the Polanskis for Anchor Bay,
Henry and Magic for
Dark Sky, some Russ Meyer’s for Arrow.
Now, under the guise of our new Funhouse Productions, we’re doing quite
a bit for other companies, mainly for MPI/Dark Sky who are releasing
more great material on DVD than anyone at the moment. From big: a
feature length doc on the making of Baraka, to small: just did a
commentary yesterday for Michael Reeves’ The She Beast with Ian Ogilvy,
Paul Maslansky and amazingly Barbara Steele. Now it has to be said that
Barbara didn’t want to come because she had absolutely no memory of the
film and thought it was utter rubbish when she watched it. However, we
persuaded her to come along to chime in about the Italian industry at
the time and her status as a horror star etc. so that was fun. Also just
finished featurettes on Who Can Kill A Child —
an amazing film which is criminally under-appreciated but that should
find a whole new audience with this DVD; a Kill Baby Kill
featurette with Lamberto Bava which will hopefully see the light of day
once some awkward legalities are ironed out; Count Dracula;
Antibodies; This Filthy World;
The Last Hunter with Edoardo Margheriti; Ricco
with Chris Mitchum etc. All good stuff. And I have my biggest project of
all coming up with MPI/Dark Sky which we’re all very excited about but
can’t give out any more details at this point in case I jinx it.
Then we’ve recently done a bunch of stuff for other companies too like
Anchor Bay (Withnail & I), Optimum (Don’t
Look Now) and Blue Underground US (yes, they’re still
going).
David with Ian Ogilvy, Barbara Steele
and Paul Maslansky taking a break from recording the commentary for
The She Beast.
You have uncovered a lot of information on films that genre
fans love. What info are you most proud of uncovering?
It’s exciting when you uncover footage from a film which hasn’t ever
before made it onto home video such as with Salon Kitty or
The Bloody Judge
or more recently with Perversion Story. I
can’t take the credit for discovering that though — it depends what the
licensor or the filmmaker has in their vaults.
Bill
Lustig has a reputation for quality and perfectionism did this ever
prove to be a problem when acquiring rare films?
I don’t think his perfectionism caused problems in acquisitions — if
good elements weren’t available we wouldn’t acquire. No, the
perfectionism simply led to sometimes big bills for restoration. Films
like Salon Kitty, The Bloody Judge,
Django, Africa Addio,
Scum needed a tremendous amount of work in
order to get them up to the BU standard. More work was probably done on
those films than MGM did on their James Bond catalogue. Once he set a
standard for the label he wanted to keep it up even if it meant that a
given title had no chance of making back the money invested in it.
You
recently left Blue Underground to start your own label. Can you tell us
what lead to this and how it started?
There was no way that we could keep up the release schedule that we had
at BU from 2002 through 2006. It had to slow down and therefore there
was no need for me and a couple of other people to be there full time
any longer and we had other things we wanted to pursue. Joyce Shen was
the first of the core team to leave and she went and formed No Shame.
Matt Kennedy left to form Panik House. And although I knew I had
opportunities to continue featurette work for other companies I felt
that it would be a good backbone of a new company to start releasing
some titles too. Gwendoline had been offered
to us and Bill thought it was rubbish so wasn’t too keen to do it. I
felt it had an audience so went ahead and licensed it with my BU UK
partner Carl Daft and sat on it until the time was right to launch a new
label which became Severin.
Another BU US alum John Cregan is also a part of the Severin team.
Severin
is focusing mainly on Erotic films, do you think you will be perhaps
tackling any other genres soon?
There are a lot of labels out there concentrating primarily on horror
and yet there aren’t too many good titles left. When there’s a two disc
special edition of One Dark Night on the
market, you know there’s some barrel scraping going on. That’s not to
say that there’s not some interesting horror product as yet unreleased
or in need of a re-release but there’s no way we could compete with
bigger companies with bigger check books for the top level stuff and
there’s just too many labels going after the more niche stuff. In the
end we won’t rule out anything if it comes our way. There are less
labels going after the sexploitation gems at the moment and there’s
still a wealth of blinding titles which have yet to get the digital
treatment.
How do you decide what titles to release through Severin? Is
it all about name recognition or is there more to it than that?
We like to go back to the great exploitation filmmakers, the Fulcis, the
Francos, the D’Amatos whenever possible because these guys could produce
phenomenal exploitation no matter what the parameters, whether it be
horror or erotic or whatever. Then there are some erotic masters like Borowczyk, Jaeckin or John Lamond whose work has been
'relatively ignored'
in the DVD era. These guys made great, unique, beautifully shot films
which really delivered.
Why the obsession with Franco? :)
Jess Franco becomes more and more interesting the more we learn about
his body of work. Ten years ago there would not have been the knowledge
or debate about his work that goes on today and that’s thanks to DVD.
The majority of people out there still think he sucks and I’m always
amused when a reviewer refers to him as the worst
director ever. On the
surface you could be forgiven for thinking that and there’s no question
that the guy has made some stinkers and is prone to cutting corners. But
I’m reading more and more people these days saying “I used to hate him
but now...” And I think there’s good reason: the guy is definitely an
auteur, there are very specific themes that run throughout all of his
work; he has always worked with his own set of rules totally ignoring
criticism and convention; and of course for Franco-files it’s almost
like exploitation archaeology because of the vast amount of films he’s
made in their varying versions, we know there’s just so much still to
discover. Not to mention he has got to be one of the most entertaining
interviewees in DVD-dom. It’s hard to believe he has such vivid memories
about each and every one of his productions. I’ve interviewed him I
think on five or six separate occasions now about some twenty films and
I’m looking forward to interviewing him again soon. Physically, he gets
frailer every time I see him, but that instinct for anecdote
recollection and controversial opinion is as bright as ever.
It's funny to think that in the future thanks to DVD there'll be more
first hand information available about Franco's body of work than
Fellini's or Ford's!
Is Franco surprised by the recent attention afforded his work?
Franco thinks the new attention to his work is surprising in that after
all these years of audiences and critics thinking he’s useless, he’s
finally got a growing group that actually appreciates what he’s been
trying to do all along and that makes him happy. He likes to see that
his films are getting attention, being released on DVD all over the
world. From what he’s told me he’s been very happy with the presentation
of the films I’ve worked on but I’m not sure he watches them thoroughly.
He and Lina don’t like watching their films. His main passion is still
cinema though. He says that if he stops shooting he will die. That’s why
every so often a new Franco film will come along and sometimes it’s shot
in his apartment over a couple of days. He sent me his three latest
projects just the other day.
Did Franco ever voice any dissatisfaction with variant
editions being used in place of a specific edit he preferred?
The only time he has expressed anything about a certain cut of one of
his films was on 99 Women. For obvious reasons
he completely disowned the XXX Rated French cut. But he doesn’t get
involved in the restoration of his films unless he has a vested
interest, which on most of them he doesn’t. On the occasions I’ve asked
him about definitive versions of his films it’s been in relation to the
Towers films and he either says “there’s only one version” or “the
Italian cut is the longest.” Therefore it’s ironic that the recent
controversy over Dark Sky’s cut of Count Dracula
(which was transferred from a film element stored at a lab in Rome
and not a composite of different versions created by Dark Sky)
originated in Italy. It’s unlikely that Franco had major input in the
post-production of the Towers films because different versions were
created in the differing co-producing territories. He was more than
likely onto his next film while editing was taking place on these films.
That’s not to say he had no involvement, but a Director’s Cut in the
true sense of the term on these films probably doesn’t exist and never
did.
I always ask him if there are certain films of his he’d like to see on
DVD and he never gives a definitive answer. He’ll suggest films that he
has some ownership in but usually they aren’t the cream of the Franco
crop. Interestingly of all the films we’ve worked on he was most
intrigued by the Golden films Severin are putting out, (not because he
thought they were good, I hasten to add, any Franco-file knows he
doesn’t love any of his films) but because they’d received precious
little distribution up to that point and he wanted them to be seen.
One of the highlights of your career has been the Godfathers of Mondo
documentary. Any chance we'll see you affiliated with getting more mondo
movies onto DVD in the future?
I’d like to do Mondo Candido, Jacopetti and
Prosperi’s final film together but have no idea who owns the rights. I’m
not really a fan of mondo movies per se, I was mainly interested in
these two guys who obviously had vision and a serious dedication to
their art form to go out a do what they did. The films were and will
always be controversial but they set out to do something with integrity
and they did it. Not too many filmmakers are as dedicated as they were,
no matter how misguided. That to me is what makes them fascinating
subjects.
With the Perversion Story release Severin also included the
soundtrack CD and it looks like the Black Emanuelle set will also
include some music from those films. Is this something we can expect to
see often from Severin?
It’s nice to have these stellar soundtracks included but they ain’t
cheap. We’ll certainly do more if people respond and if the title
warrants it. The second Black Emanuelle box will also have a compilation
of tracks from Em in America, Last
Cannibals and White Slave Trade (though these aren’t
the films in the box I hasten to add, they are the three other Nico
Fidenco Black Emanuelle soundtracks — the first box’s
soundtrack will be a compilation of tracks from Black Emanuelle,
Em in Bangkok and Em Around the World).
I should point out here that the Perversion Story
cut that we released was the only film element that was available to us.
We did not choose to put this version out over One On Top Of
The Other, it was a question of what film elements exist.
We searched labs in Rome and collectors over here and were unable to
trace a useable film element of One On Top Of The Other.
We consulted amongst ourselves and with our distributors and some
euro-cult experts and seeing as the Perversion Story
cut was
a genuine alternate release version of this film containing
extra sex scenes, never before seen in any English Language version, we concluded it was a perfectly legitimate version to
release onto the collector’s market.
On a similar subject, the version of Emanuelle Around the
World which will be in Black Emanuelle’s
box will not be the XXX Rated version. Most stores will not stock XXX
material and so that would severely diminish our ability to get the box
out there. And it could certainly be argued that the non-XXX version is
more official seeing as Laura Gemser has no part of it — a body double
is used in her scene. But then it would be rude not to release the XXX
version seeing as it gives Emanuelle in America
a run for its money when it comes to shock value!
Is there anyone out there in the industry you'd really like to interview
or do a featurette on? A sort of holy grail director or performer?
I’ve had the good fortune to interview two of my filmmaking idols:
Polanski and John Waters (just recently, for MPI’s upcoming release
of This Filthy World). David Lynch is the
outstanding one. There are others though, Almodovar, Scorsese.
Any chance that Severin will release any Jean Rollin films
in the future? His filmography would fit in well with the label's
catalogue.
Hm. Hadn’t considered it but it’s not out of the question.
What's next for Severin after the Black Emanuelle's box release?
Next we have two more Francos from his Golden period, Sexual
Story of O and Inconfessable Orgies of
Emmanuelle, and anyone who’s seen our discs of
Macumba Sexual and Mansion of the Living
Dead will know what to expect quality-wise. Then we have
Laure starring Annie Belle and
Emmanuelle Arsan. And pretty soon after that we have
Malabimba – The Malicious Whore and
Satan’s Baby Doll. At the moment we’re still trying to
track down film elements for missing scenes from Malabimba
otherwise we’ll have to include them as deleted scenes sourced from a
VHS. Now, Andrea Bianchi is another for whom I have developed a serious
affection in this DVD age. Burial Ground and
Strip Nude for your Killer are unbelievably sleazy affairs and we love ‘em.
Malabimba is about as sleazy as it gets — it’s
a filthy, blasphemous masterpiece! Or as John Severin would say “the
second best film ever made!” (after Felicity).
Later we’ll have the second Black Em box, more Fulci (if sales on
Perversion Story are ok), more Borowczyk etc.
Be sure to check out the Serverin Website at
www.severin-films.com
Special Thanks to David
Gregory, Ian Jane, Carl Daft,
John Cregan and Troy Howarth.