Originally posted by ##RaCeR##
so how do people come to film these accidents?
I decided to look up an interview with the guy who made the first four from the series we\'re calling "Faces." (Name changed to appease Sammy
)
"I\'ll never forget: All of a sudden on the news one night they\'re talking about Faces!" says John Schwartz, who directed and wrote the movie and its sequels I through IV (there are now eight Faces movies). The flick was intended as a Japanese-only release in 1979, but found its way to the United States, and the national news, a couple of years later.
"I almost fell out of my chair," says Schwartz in a phone interview. "Dan Rather on CBS was talking about these "incredibly horrible videos.\' \'Cause everybody thought they were real!"
If anybody thinks Faces is footage of actual deaths, it\'s because it says so on the video\'s box, right under the cheesy drawing of the hooded skull with the forked tongue and fangs. Schwartz and company did film real footage of slaughterhouses and autopsy rooms, but any other "real" deaths came from file footage.
"We traveled to all these different film libraries to see what we could find about death and disaster," says Schwartz. "I found this footage of this woman jumping off a building, and it was just incredible footage. But the part of the footage we didn\'t have was the aftermath. So we (filmed) inserts into the actual footage to match it."
Then how did Schwartz and company acquire the more bizarre footage? "I was the leader of the flesh-eating cult," Schwart admits. "I had scenes in each of these movies. . . . I\'m the crazy, drugged-out killer. . . . I play this freaky rapist in the courtroom scene, and they show the rape on video, and it just so happens that the girl (in the rape scene) was this girl I was dating at the time."
You mean, the famous electric chair scene was fake? But the guy was foaming at the mouth and everything!
"We built a cell in a friend\'s loft, and we lined the guy\'s mouth with toothpaste," says Schwartz, laughing. "My research material for that: I happened to pick up a Hustler magazine and there was this great article about electrocution that really detailed how a person is executed. . . . And that\'s what I used as my basis."
Well there you have it. Kind of waters down that series, doesn\'t it? Says the original cost $450,000 to make and has grossed $30 million to date.
-Eik
