Superstition

Carolco Pictures enjoyed a remarkable decade sparked by the success of First Blood (1982), an adaptation of the David Morrell novel directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring Sylvester Stallone in his first box office success post-Rocky (1976) and its first two sequels. Founded in 1976 by film distributors Mario Kussar and Andrew G. Vajna (who progressed from film acquisition and distribution to film production), Carolco put its weight behind such films as Peter Medak's The Changeling (1980) and John Huston's Victory (1981) before taking a gamble on buying the film rights to the Morrell book from Warner Bros. and agreeing to pay Stallone's salary. In March 1981, Carolco bought ad space in The Hollywood Reporter to promote two of its upcoming original productions, First Blood and Superstition (1982), whetting industry appetites for two substantial, important 1982 releases. They were half right. While First Blood earned back ten times its $14 million budget and paved the way for the megaton profits of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Rambo III (1988), Total Recall (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Superstition was given a limited East Coast release in January 1985 before being dumped onto VHS tape. Superstition had begun as a ten-minute teaser, a show reel shopped at the Milan Film Festival, where it caught the attention of Carolco. The makers of the demo were a handful of Hollywood newcomers led by Michael O. Sajbel and Brad White, whose film industry bona fides were limited to scutwork on movies made by Arkansas-based do-it-yourselfer Charles B. Pierce, among them Grayeagle (1977), The Norseman (1978), and Mountain Family Robinson (1979). Unable to scare up work in Hollywood, Sajbel, White, and their friend Bret Plate began to rough out a project they could make on their own initiative and offer as a calling card. The trio secured a director in James Roberson, cinematographer of Pierce's exploitation classic The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) and a director in his own right with the ultra-low budget The Legend of Alfred Packer (1980), inspiration for Trey Parker's Cannibal! The Musical (1993). Showing the Italianate influence of Mario Bava and Dario Argento while owing a debt as well to The Amityville Horror (1979), and stamped with the preliminary title Witch, the teaser excited sufficient interest in Milan to secure its entire shooting budget through European presales. Assigned to oversee the transition to feature length was Ed Carlin, whose exploitation resume included such drive-in fodder as The Swinging Barmaids (1975) and Moonshine County Express (1977), as well as the grindhouse horrors Blood and Lace (1971), and The Evil (1978). Though Sajbel had a full screenplay for Witch ready to go, Carlin hired actor/writer Donald Thompson to deliver a rewrite. Thompson's script for what came to be called Superstition echoes his work on The Evil, from the setting of a long-shuttered mansion whose walls contain (barely) some unspeakable evil and the business of a ceremonial crucifix whose removal from the premises leads to inexplicable and gory deaths. Carlin also brought to the project a leading lady in ex-wife Lynn Carlin, then in the bell lap of a career that had begun with roles in John Cassavetes' Faces (1968) and Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971), while rounding out his cast with such Hollywood jobbers as Larry Pennell (Dash Riprock on TV's The Beverly Hillbillies) and Albert Salmi (then coming off of small but prominent roles in Caddyshack and Brubaker, both 1980), as well as stage actor Robert Symonds, who had played one of Linda Blair's doctors in The Exorcist (1973). Filming of Superstition took place in the Los Angeles municipality of Silver Lake, former home of the Mack Sennett Studios and site of the concrete Garbutt House. Built on a promontory once known as Dunnigan Hill, the 20-room, bunker-like Garbutt mansion was designed by its owner, Frank Alderman Garbutt, to withstand fire, flood, and earthquake - as much a sanctuary against the elements as a testimony to the indomitable will of the man himself. Son of a Colorado mining magnate and a founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, Garbutt channeled his own adamantine energies into the design and manufacture of mining tools, whose volume sales made him a self-made millionaire. A real estate mogul with friends in high places, Garbutt kept close to Los Angeles' white, Anglo Saxon town fathers (among them oil tycoon Edward Doheny, Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, and the board of directors of the exclusive Los Angeles Athletic Club) while also establishing contacts among the Jewish immigrants who wound up heading the major film studios; in addition to being a key behind-the-scenes player in the founding of Union Oil and the Automobile Club of Southern California, Garbutt was a co-founder of Paramount Pictures. Though Superstition was a box office non-starter in the United States, the film sold better in foreign markets, playing Mexico City cinemas for two years and doing so well as a VHS rental in the United Kingdom that the film was re-issued as a theatrical release, under the title The Witch. However the books may have balanced on Superstition in the long run, Carolco Pictures proved itself uninterested in modest gains. The company's Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles alone would return combined grosses of better than $1 billion but complex funding strategies (European bank loans helped lower Carolco's tax liability in the United States), profligate spending (Rambo III cost $60 million, more than the budgets of the first two Rambo movies combined), and improvident diversification would be its downfall. Co-founder Vajna sold his interests to Kussar in 1989 (the $100 million price tag attached to Vajna's stock share would be another lavish expense on the Carolco ledger) and, with a flagging net gain, declining stock value, and the disastrous outcome of its $100 million pirate extravaganza Cutthroat Island (1995), Carolco filed for bankruptcy in 1994, offsetting its gargantuan losses by the sale of its assets to 20th Century Fox. By Richard Harland Smith Sources: Michael O. Sajbel interview by Justin Kerswell, Hysteria-Lives.com Silver Lake Chronicles: Exploring an Urban Oasis in Los Angeles by Michael Locke and Vincent Brook (The History Press, 2014) Early Paramount Studios by Marc Wanamaker, E. J. Stephens, and Michael Christaldi (Arcadia Publishing, 2013) A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the New Electronic Rainbow, 1980-1989 by Stephen Prince (University of California Press, 2002) "The Garbutt House in Silver Lake: Concrete Mansion That Capitalism Built," by Hadley Meares, www.KCET.org