It starts with a cowboy.His name is Arch Hall, and he left his South Dakota home to seek fame and fortune in 1930s Hollywood as a stuntman. He could do wild tricks-being dragged by the stirrups by a horse, jumping from one galloping steed to another, the kinds of things movies stars couldn't, no matter what their public wanted to believe.
Hall believed he had a future on the screen, but it never came to pass. He was pulled away by WW2, and when he came back he tried his hand at other careers: real estate developer, radio personality, trucking company operator...but the pull of the movies never left his blood. The dream deferred sat heavily on his soul, and then the idea came: if Hollywood wouldn't give it to him, why not just go and take it for himself? Wasn't that the true cowboy ethos?
Thus, Fairway International. A grand sounding name, its logo the equally portentous Hall family crest. Hall went into business making low-budget movies for the drive-in market-and as his top-lining star he had his own son, Arch Hall, Jr.
The wisecracking robots of Mystery Science Theater called Junior a "Cabbage Patch Elvis," which is kind of cruel-but only kind of, 'cause you can't say the description isn't accurate. Arch Hall, Jr. had corn-fed All-American-boy looks, a tussle of blonde hair in a sort of 50s era pompadour, and his own band - the Archers, for which he played lead guitar and sang. The perfect teen idol - save for his inexperience as an actor. He was roped in to the movies by his dad, neither reluctantly nor out of a personal passion of any kind, just an obedient son helping out the family trade.
The first Fairway production was The Choppers (1961), which cost the family $150,000 to make. This was cheap, even by B-movie standards, but it would be hard to recoup such costs even under the best of circumstances. And the world of indie distribution in 1959 was not the best of circumstances. Without a companion feature to fill out the double bill, Hall Senior would have little luck even getting it into theaters - and even packaged with Eegah! they'd see almost no income off of it.
Harrowed by the cost of The Choppers, Hall Sr. decided to cut back severely on expenses, and so future Fairway flicks would be made for around $30 grand. They would be, in almost all cases, the equivalent of amateur films-home movies writ large.
The Halls were now trapped in a pyramid scheme of their own making: financing new movies by mortgaging the existing catalog of productions, obliged to continue making movies in order to keep the whole enterprise afloat, hoping that eventually they'd get enough of a minor hit to pay off the accumulating debts.
This would never happen. Eventually Fairway would fold, its films would pass on into posterity merely as the butt of jokes, remembered only for their schlock value. But before that came to pass, Fairway would churn out a true no-apologies masterpiece. Lightning would strike but once, and leave behind one of the finest suspense thrillers ever made.
James Landis was an aspiring filmmaker in the infancy of a promising career, eager to make his mark with a resume piece. He approached the Halls with a screenplay he'd written about a teenager thrill killer, based loosely on the true-life murder spree of Charlie Starkweather. It was an audacious, daring script-as unlike the usual Fairway fare as night from day. Brutal, unflinching, and unpredictable, it was also good.
Arch Hall, Jr. would be for the first time truly called upon to act. Landis, anxious to make the movie everything it could be, insisted on auditioning professional actors for the role, even if he knew in the back of his mind that producer Hall Sr. wasn't going to let the film be made without his son. Junior, meanwhile, recognized that the odds of his becoming some kind of screen idol were negligible, but saw this film as the sort of opportunity everybody's been waiting for - to make something really fantastic. He worked hard with director Landis to develop his character's mannerisms and speech. When they found that he relied on his costume to inspire his performance, Landis insisted that Hall Jr. remain in costume at all times - a sort of low-rent method acting. Whatever worked.
Hall's only professional co-star was Richard Alden as the muscular yet cowardly schoolteacher Ed. The rest of the cast were the usual Fairway hodgepodge: Marilyn Manning, a secretary in an adjacent office, was called in to play the killer's equally depraved girlfriend; the film's production manager Don Russell played Carl Oliver, and as "Miss Goody Good Good" the Halls called on Helen Hovey, Junior's cousin. When a pair of policemen were needed for a scene, the production called in a pair of real policemen (who helpfully provided their own wardrobe to boot). But the lack of experience from this grab-bag cast works to their advantage, giving their respective roles more earthy realism. No one could accuse this cast of lazing off - they went so far as to allow sharpshooter Arch Hall, Sr. to fire live ammunition at them to make certain scenes as authentic as possible!
Arch Hall, Jr. delivers the performance of a lifetime. His Charlie Tibbs is one of cinema's most terrifying psychos, a gibbering manchild for whom violence is his security blanket. But the true star of the film is cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
Zsigmond had recently come from Hungary, where he and Laszlo Kovacs risked execution by the Soviets to secretly film the Hungarian Revolution. Sneaking out of Hungary with the film under his arm, Zsigmond found himself looking for work in the movie industry. The day would come when he would be winning Academy Awards, working with Hollywood's top directors, photographing classics like McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Deliverance (1972), The Deer Hunter (1978), and E.T. (1982). But in 1963 he couldn't get a job.
Say what you will about his movies, but Arch Hall, Sr. was a big-hearted man. When Zsigmond showed up in the Fairway offices, he not only got a job, but Senior would sponsor Zsigmond's entry into the cinematographer's union. With both Zsigmond and Landis at the helm, things were looking bright. These were brash young men, full of energy, determined to do everything they could to make this movie special. If that meant using their own money to buy cars to fill out the junkyard set, so be it.
Fairway was minor league Hollywood, sure, but it played by many of the same rules - such as the common practice of faking something rather than use the real thing. So rather than shoot at a real junkyard, they sweet-talked the owners of a ranch near the San Fernando Valley into letting them strew broken-down oily cars across their land and film there for a few weeks. In the end, Landis pulled in his feature for less than it cost Fairway to make the execrable Eegah!, but that didn't stop Zsigmond from shooting each and every shot with extraordinary cinematic flair. Consider this: The Choppers, which cost almost 5 times as much to make, was mostly filmed in a single room: the Fairway office itself, with one wall serving as one "location," another wall another set, and so on. But Landis and Zsigmond set up a new camera angle for virtually every single shot in The Sadist, each one chosen for maximum dramatic and narrative effect.
On top of all that, Zsigmond was challenged to fight the sun. As they were filming, the movie was still called 12:01--a nod to its real-time structure (24 eat your heart out). So while the sun tracked each day across the sky, Zsigmond moved powerful lights around to cheat the shadows and make everything appear to occur at high noon. Moving the camera was a major hassle-the heavy equipment involved and the delicate choreography to make it right was a lot for the cash-strapped budget to bear, so Landis and Zsigmond used it sparingly. But like the best of Fritz Lang, they knew just when to pull out their camera tricks to get the most mileage out of them. If you're not sweating, your fists clenched on the edge of your arm rest, your teeth gritted as this movie reaches its climax, you ain't been payin' attention.
Rechristened The Sadist for release in April of 1963, it was paired with Ray Dennis Steckler's The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Steckler groused that the Halls gave preferential treatment to The Sadist at the expense of his picture; he parted company with Fairway and set out to distribute his zombie musical on his own. Meanwhile Landis, Zsigmond and Arch Hall, Jr. felt the double-bill was inappropriate for other reasons. Hall Jr. told interviewer Tom Weaver, "I'm not sure The Sadist belonged on a double-bill with Incredibly Strange Creatures, that just didn't make any sense to me from the get-go. I think it was demeaning to the quality of The Sadist."
Two years later, the dream team behind The Sadist were reunited on Deadwood 76. It was an old-school B-Western at a time when the declining market for Westerns was about to give way to a new breed of Spaghetti Westerns, and it was a flop. Landis, Zsigmond, and Arch Hall, Jr. were unable to recreate the magic that had enlivened their past hit, and Fairway came to an unfair end. Arch Hall Senior died in 1978, was buried with unprecedented honors by the Sioux Nation, and was eventually played onscreen by Robert Mitchum in the fictionalized bio-pic The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961). Arch Hall, Jr. left the entertainment world for his true passion, flying, as a commercial pilot. Zsigmond, as we've seen, went on to extraordinary heights within mainstream Hollywood. Landis never reached his true potential, his career sputtering to a halt not long after the debacle of Deadwood 76. But there remains a relic of that special moment in time when it all came together: The Sadist lives on as a white-knuckle thriller the likes of which are rarely minted inside Hollywood or outside it.
Sources:
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
AFI
Earth vs. the Sci-Fi Filmmakers:20 Interviews by Tom Weaver
Shock Cinema: Interview with Vilmos Zsigmond by David Konow
Compiled by David Kalat
