Insider Info (The Giant Spider Invasion) - BEHIND THE SCENES
Of course, it's grossly unfair to compare the near-amateur production of The Giant Spider Invasion to Stephen King. They aren't quite playing the same game. Bill Rebane had dreamt of making dramas and comedies, but found himself relegated to the horror/science-fiction genre because that was the only way for an independently made feature in the early 1970s to reliably find profit-making distribution outlets. So, knowing this, Rebane took a jaundiced look at the field's standard-bearer, Roger Corman, and tried to distill a basic Cormanesque exploitation movie formula. This he then gave to writer Richard Huff, a Madison-based scribe who hadn't worked on a film before and never would again, who cooked up the basic idea of monster spiders attacking Wisconsin.
Based on Huff's story, Rebane went ahead and cast the film, contracting Hollywood veterans like Alan Hale, Steve Brodie and Barbara Hale. The performers arrived, and Rebane was scheduled to start shooting-the only problem was that Huff had yet to turn that idea into an actual workable script. Alan Hale suggested to his director that he might be well advised to bring on Robert Easton, a professor of English at the University of California known to the acting community there as a reliable dialogue coach. In other words, Easton was a man of letters who knew the film industry and could be counted on to help shape the material into something usable.
Easton arrived and was tasked with churning out ten to fifteen pages a day, an absurd deadline. To keep the man on task, says Rebane, "the producers took Robert and locked him in a cabin by the lake and told him that he had to finish so many pages a day or they wouldn't feed him. Now, Robert likes his food. He's really a genuine connoisseur, so him not getting any food was just an unbelievable thought to him, but the line producer held his ground."
Under these conditions, Easton did generate the script pages-which would then be forwarded to Huff for his revisions, then to the producers for review and approval, then back to Easton, and only then on to the set. Meanwhile, during this crazy cycle, Rebane had to keep shooting, filming a movie whose ending had yet to be decided.
Needless to say, the strain on the production team showed. The Giant Spider Invasion's biggest thrill sequence was to see the giant spiders attacking the town, in a recreation of the kind of classic scenes typical for 1950's era monster flicks. The filmmakers announced that the sequence was to be filmed in the nearby town of Merrill, and advertised for interested Merrillites to apply as extras. It became the cause célèbre of local life-with extensive print and TV coverage by the Merrill press of the event, which was kicked off by political luminaries like a Wisconsin Senator and the Mayor of Merrill making official speeches. The crowd had been worked up, but as the appointed hour dawned there was yet no sign of the crew or the spiders. The hours dragged by, and only later that night, when all but the most hardcore wanna-be extras had long since departed and the patience of those who remained had been thoroughly exhausted, did the ludicrous spider props appear. The cameras had been loaded with film stock in anticipation of the midday shoot, and as a result the finished scene is badly underexposed and grainy, and the crowd is visibly agitated and bad-tempered.
Later, the time came for Rebane to film a stunning explosion of one of the spiders. The effects team covered the prop with gunpowder and dispatched a crew member (history does not record his name, if he was on Star Trek he'd have been wearing a red shirt) to drop matches onto the spider from above. Match after match fell to the gunpowder-dusted creature without igniting any flame. Hoping to get something started, the lowly crew member lit the entire pack of matches and dropped them all at once-still nothing. Despairing, Rebane called "cut." And at that moment, as the film stopped, the spider went up in a massive explosion that singed the hair off Mr. Red Shirt. As the ruined spider smoldered, so did Rebane, his one-time effect lost.
It is part of the curious nature of this oddball movie that it has its share of genuine production value: helicopters, exploding cars, giant spiders, fleeing mobs. Yet for all this it never feels anything other than cheap.
Indeed, the whole shebang cost no more than $250,000 (that's the equivalent of roughly a million dollars today). As The Giant Spider Invasion made its way through the drive-ins and exploitation houses, and then to the CBS Late Night Movie, though, it found an appreciative audience and managed to recoup a staggering $22 Million in return ($89 Million in today's figures).
Fellow Wisconsinite Mike Nelson knew the score. He lampooned The Giant Spider Invasion on Mystery Science Theater 3000 but in the spirit of a roast. In 2005, Nelson hosted a film festival in Rebane's honor, which helped spark a revival of interest in The Giant Spider Invasion. Made to feed an exploitation market's ephemeral hunger, here the movie still stands, unbowed by time, and here it is screened on cable's most prestigious movie channel. Hardly surprising, then, that Rebane has started talking about a sequel, which Rebane believes would benefit from more professional-looking CGI effects. For something not so far removed from an amateur production, that's quite an accomplishment.
by David Kalat
Sources:
Dave Coleman, Interview with Bill Rebane, Bijouflix.com
Gene Dorsogna, "The Spider Was a Beetle, or: Pardon Me But Your Chassis is Showing," Horror-Wood.com
Bill Rebane, BillRebaneNews.com
John Thonen, "Bill Rebane's Giant Spider Invasion," Mania.com
Cory J. Udler, "Reliving the Invasion," video documentary.
