November 2004
They Came. They Sawed.
In 1973 a ragtag group of Texans scrounged up $60,000 and created a film so violent and visionary that it shocked the world. But if you thought The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was strange, then you haven’t heard the story of how it got made.
MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO the collective might of Columbia Pictures descended on Austin with one of that studio’s blue-ribbon, A-team moviemaking armies: Blythe Danner, Anthony Perkins, Beau Bridges, a hot director named Sidney Lumet, an ingenue named Susan Sarandon, and the same producer who had already made small-town Texas a bankable commodity with the adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. The prestige project settled in at the Chariot Inn, where Danner had a permanent sign on her door—“Quiet! Mother and Baby Sleeping”—to protect the weeks-old Gwyneth Paltrow. And each day a wagon train of private Winnebagos, Cinemobiles, catering trucks, and Greyhound buses would fan out around Bastrop for the filming of yet another McMurtry novel, Leaving Cheyenne.
On a certain day, the production broke for lunch, and the movie’s proud papa, producer Steve Friedman, noticed a scruffy, long-haired hippie making his way through the food line. Friedman walked over and blocked his way. “Do you work on the movie?” he demanded.
The interloper held a plastic plate with two barbecued chicken wings on it. “Uh, no.”
“Then put the chicken back.”
The disheveled guy meekly took the chicken wings back to the catering truck. In 1974 Columbia released Lovin’ Molly, as the picture came to be called, to universal critical yawns, caused in part by its almost-three-hour running time. “If I were forced to settle on one word to describe Lovin’ Molly,” wrote McMurtry at the time, “‘casual’ might be the word—though ‘indifferent’ would run it an excellent race. . . . Certainly [Lumet’s] indifference to locale was so total that one is sorry he was put to the anguish of uprooting himself from home and hearth for even the few short weeks he could bring himself to stay in Texas.” Today most people have no idea that Leaving Cheyenne was ever filmed, and it is unavailable even in specialty video stores that otherwise stock the entire Lumet oeuvre.
And the chicken-stealing hippie? He ambled back to Austin and, even before Lovin’ Molly was released, completed the most financially successful film in the history of Texas, a film that is still shown in almost every country of the world and whose innovations have continued to influence the horror genre for the past thirty years. Using $60,000 raised by an Austin politician, he filmed mostly in and around an old Victorian house in Round Rock with a crew that used exactly two vehicles—a Chevy van for the film equipment and a broken-down 1964 Dodge Travco motor home for the actors’ dressing rooms. The result was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film whose very title has become America’s cultural shorthand for perversity, moral decline, and especially the corruption of children. Yet the movie’s pure intensity, startling technique, and reputation as an outlaw film have brought praise from a group as diverse as Steven Spielberg, the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese (Travis Bickle watches it in Taxi Driver), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, almost every metal band of the past twenty years, and the Colombo crime family of Brooklyn, which gleefully ranked it right up there with Deep Throat as one of its major sources of income in the seventies.
Chainsaw was the first real “slasher” film, and it changed many things—the ratings code of the Motion Picture Association of America, the national debate on violence, the Texas Film Commission, the horror genre—but it remained a curiously isolated phenomenon. The film itself, involving five young people on a twisted drive through the country, is a strange, shifting experience—early audiences were horrified; later audiences laughed; newcomers to the movie were inevitably stricken with a vaguely uneasy feeling, as though the movie might have actually been made by a maniac—but the story behind the film is even stranger.
“Why did you steal the chicken?” I ask Tobe Hooper, now 61, as we sit in his Austin living room, surrounded by oversized movie posters (including one for the French release of Chainsaw) and next to a creepy robotic clown used in his 1981 film, The Funhouse.
“Why was I there?” he says, frowning. “I was with somebody. I don’t remember who.” He takes a gulp of Dr Pepper.
“Man, I just can’t access it,” he says at last. “I think I was just hanging out and I got hungry.”
It’s the kind of answer you often get when inquiring about the production and tortured life of Chainsaw. It was conceived, shaped, filmed, edited, and released in a kind of mild doper’s haze, like a free-love happening that, on the third day, turns a little ugly. The more you learn about its making, the less it seems the invention of a screenwriter or a director or an acting company than the product of Austin itself at the end of the Vietnam era. It was a different, now-vanished Austin, a place where the canonical six degrees of separation had been reduced to one or two, where both the governor and the small-time marijuana dealer were likely to know the chairman of the Public Broadcasting Service and where legislators and lawyers and lobbyists could easily form marriages of convenience with poets and quirky filmmakers.
And all these years later, almost everyone involved feels permanently changed or, in some cases, permanently scarred by the film. At least one actor—Ed Neal, who played the “hitchhiker”—can’t speak about it without becoming enraged. Robert Kuhn, a trial lawyer who invested in the film, would waste years fighting for the profits that should have poured into Austin but were instead siphoned off by a distribution company. Marilyn Burns, the strikingly beautiful actress who became the prototype for the “final girl” in horror films, never realized her great promise, partly because the film was a “résumé-killer.” Gunnar Hansen, the three-hundred-pound Icelandic American who played Leatherface—the chain-saw-wielding maniac who inspired Jason and Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger—has spent the rest of his life trying to stake out another identity. “I’m happy I did it,” he says, “but they’ll probably put ‘Gunnar Hansen. He was Leatherface’ on my gravestone.” And Hooper continues to fight, now thirty years after the film’s release, against the stereotype of being “just a horror director,” while Chainsaw’s screenwriter, Kim Henkel, became so frustrated with his subsequent “multipicture” Hollywood deal that he moved back to Port Aransas in the early eighties, where he’s remained ever since as a part-time university film teacher in Corpus Christi. Only the late Warren Skaaren, the first director of the Texas Film Commission, who would become one of the highest-paid rewrite men in Hollywood, and Ron Bozman, the film’s production manager, who would accept the 1991 Academy award for best picture as one of the producers of The Silence of the Lambs, ascended to the pinnacle of their profession. Still, even Bozman says that Chainsaw was the greater thrill. “It was by far the more intense experience. Nothing compares to it for density of experience. It was just such a wild ride.”
Like a guy who wins the lottery with the first ticket he ever buys, then wonders a year later where his money has gone, the extended Chainsaw family seems battered and a little amazed by it all. Yet for more than two decades now, the status of the film has been constantly on the rise. Few horror films survive the teen generation that first sees them, yet the myths and legends surrounding Chainsaw have continuously expanded. Many people believed, and still believe, that the movie is entirely true, in part because of its effective cinema verité documentary style. In this respect, Hooper anticipated The Blair Witch Project by 26 years, and he did it without the advantage of cheap video. Far from being an artless “shaky cam” documentary, Chainsaw is Hitchcockian in its complex editing: In a film less than ninety minutes long, there are a total of 868 edits, some of them as short as four frames, or one sixth of a second. No wonder it shocked the world. Forry Ackerman, a writer and film historian who has watched every horror film made since 1922, said even his jaded eyes believed the actors were real people. “It’s a watershed work,” he told Brad Shellady in the video documentary Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait. “It brought a new dimension of reality to horror films.”
And that reality, in 1974, was not entirely welcome.
The Auteur
THE WAY HOOPER REMEMBERS IT NOW, the inspiration for Chainsaw occurred at Montgomery Ward during the frenzied Christmas shopping rush in December of 1972: “There were these big Christmas crowds, I was frustrated, and I found myself near a display rack of chain saws. I just kind of zoned in on it. I did a rack focus to the saws, and I thought, ‘I know a way I could get through this crowd really quickly.’ I went home, sat down, all the channels just tuned in, the zeitgeist blew through, and the whole damn story came to me in what seemed like about thirty seconds. The hitchhiker, the older brother at the gas station, the girl escaping twice, the dinner sequence, people out in the country out of gas.”
