They Came. They Sawed.
(Page 3 of 8)
The Lobbyist
BILL PARSLEY ALWAYS MADE IT CLEAR that he was not a lobbyist, because that would be a violation of state law. But as the vice president of financial affairs for Texas Tech University, he spoke like a lobbyist, acted like a lobbyist, and had both the paunch and the pate of the species. Parsley was from West Texas and had raised a family in Lubbock, where he befriended Governor Preston Smith, and both men shared more than a passing interest in motion pictures—Smith because he owned a chain of theaters, Parsley because he fancied himself a movie producer. Parsley had dabbled in community theater, been a radio deejay, and during his two terms in the Legislature, established a close friendship with oilman R. B. McGowen, of Sherman. The two men had already financed two films that have been, perhaps fortunately, lost to history. Even their titles are unknown, but one was a black exploitation film about a jet-setting publisher with a harem of lovers, a sort of black Hugh Hefner. The other was a horror film that was “simply terrible,” according to Parsley’s son, Austin attorney Clint Parsley. By 1973 Bill Parsley was known as one of the lords of Austin’s Villa Capri cocktail lounge, a lobbyist hangout where he frequently bought rounds for politicos and where he sometimes introduced himself to pretty young girls as a movie producer.
Parsley was also well known to Warren Skaaren, the nerdy, well-scrubbed Minnesotan who had become the first head of the Texas Film Commission, in 1971. Skaaren, an Eagle Scout inevitably described as “charming” and “persuasive,” had been student body president at Rice University and, soon after graduation, had finagled a job in the Preston Smith administration. In the early seventies, after New Mexico became the first state to form its own film commission, Skaaren broached the same idea with Jerry Hall, a lobbyist and consultant who worked for the governor. In short order Governor Smith had formed the Texas Film Commission and named Skaaren to head it. One of the first movies Skaaren set about promoting was Lovin’ Molly, but he was especially anxious to get involved with homegrown projects.
When Skaaren called in the early summer of 1973 and excitedly told Parsley about a new horror movie in the works, the older man responded immediately. The two met at the Sheraton Crest hotel in Austin, and Skaaren told Parsley the delightfully grisly plot of “Head Cheese.” A week or so later Parsley met with Hooper and Henkel and told them he would agree to raise a $60,000 operating budget in exchange for 50 percent of the picture. It was $20,000 more than Hooper had spent on Eggshells, so they readily agreed. The three of them then trooped over to the office of Robert Kuhn, Parsley’s attorney, to draw up the papers, but the sight of the West Texas politician and his two new hippie friends didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
“They were a couple of kids,” says Kuhn. “From the first moment they came into my office, I knew there wasn’t any way in the world they could put that film together. But Bill was with them, and Bill was such a conservative guy, and he was so convinced that it was gonna work. I used to tell him, ‘Parsley, you’d do anything to make a dollar, wouldn’t you?’ And this was just the latest thing he was doing. I didn’t even know the idea of the movie. I just knew it was called ‘Head Cheese’ and that, when it failed, it would be a tax write-off.”
Yet by the end of the week, Kuhn had responded to Parsley’s enthusiasm by deciding to throw in $10,000 of his own money—only to find out that there weren’t enough shares left. Henkel’s sister Katherine, a student at the University of Texas, had decided to invest $1,000, and one of Kuhn’s acquaintances, Richard Saenz, a client of another Austin attorney, had put up $10,000. With Parsley investing $40,000, Kuhn had to settle for a $9,000 share. A little amazed by their good fortune, Henkel and Hooper moved full speed ahead.
Skaaren, who had brokered the deal, would fade in and out of the checkered history of Chainsaw. But he made his most lasting contribution to the film just one week before principal photography commenced that summer. He suggested that Hooper and Henkel throw out both of their working titles—“Head Cheese” and ”Leatherface”—and call it “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Lost Children
A 21-YEAR-OLD DRAMA STUDENT at the University of Texas, Marilyn Burns—who would become the greatest screamer in movie history—was the only actress serving on the Texas Film Commission. A petite blond stunner, she made herself useful to Skaaren by volunteering for office work, but in reality she just wanted to find out who was making the next movie and how she could get into it. As a painfully shy Catholic girl growing up in Houston, she had suddenly burst out of her shell in the seventh grade when she put on red lipstick and blue eye shadow as a camped-up Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She then spent most of her years at Memorial High School plotting her future movie career. When Robert Altman filmed Brewster McCloud in Houston, she scored a bit part as the Astrodome tour guide. When The Great Waldo Pepper reached Texas, she signed up as an extra and, in the big scene in which a plane is mobbed, outran every other extra so her face would be seen on camera. At UT she says she was “a mean Helen of Troy,” and she stayed in Austin another year after graduation because there were so many people in town—most of them lobbyists or legislators—who had told her they’d like to invest in her script ideas. It was no coincidence that Burns had been a cocktail waitress at the Villa Capri, where Parsley and his political cronies held court almost every night.
No one is quite sure who first brought Burns to the attention of Hooper. It might have been Skaaren, or Ron Bozman, or Parsley, all of whom knew her. She had initially been cast for one of the small roles in Lovin’ Molly, but Sidney Lumet apologized and took the role back when Blythe Danner’s agent insisted on making another actress part of the same deal. That actress was Susan Sarandon. Ever the trouper, Burns accepted Lumet’s consolation offer. “I was the stand-in for both Blythe Danner and Susan Sarandon,” she says, “and I wasn’t the right height or body type for either of them, so of course everyone hated me.” The only time she had ever seen Hooper was on the day when he tried to steal the chicken: “Everyone was in a foul mood already, because it was blackened chicken, and you had all these New Yorkers complaining about it, asking what Liquid Smoke was.”
Parsley told Burns that he owned half of a little horror movie that was being made and suggested that he wanted her to star in it. When she finally went in to try out for Hooper, Henkel remembers that she got the part of Sally, the well-endowed blonde destined to be the only survivor, almost immediately. “Tobe always liked busty women,” he recalls, “and Marilyn is a busty woman, and, well, he was enchanted.” (Apparently so was Parsley. When he had Kuhn draw up the papers for the company investing in the movie, he named it M.A.B. Inc. A lot of people thought the “MAB” stood for “Marilyn A. Burns.”)
The rest of the cast was assembled from area drama schools, community theater groups, friends, relatives, and local curiosity seekers. Allen Danziger, who had appeared in Eggshells along with his wife and eight-month-old son, was perfectly cast as the curly-headed van driver, Jerry, who refuses to take anything seriously. Teri McMinn, the leading actress that season at St. Edward’s University, starred in The Rainmaker each night and worked days as Pam, the fearful astrology-obsessed cutie in short shorts who would be immortalized when she was impaled on a meat hook. (“That was always the number one ‘walker’ scene,” says Henkel. “If the audience was gonna walk, that’s when they walked.”) UT drama student William Vail played her strong jock-type boyfriend, Kirk. But the scene-stealing role belonged to Paul Partain.
As Franklin, the whiny, corpulent, wheelchair-bound brother of Sally, Partain was obnoxiously brilliant. “It was just a well-written role,” he says. “It had been promised to someone else, but I had just finished a small role in Lovin’ Molly, as the brother of Susan Sarandon, and I read two or three times and finally Tobe and Kim said, ‘Well, if he’s good enough for Sidney Lumet, he’s good enough for us.’” Partain, who had served in the Navy in Vietnam and then done a stint at the UT drama school, threw himself into the role with such Method enthusiasm that the rest of the cast ended up despising him. “I was a young, inexperienced actor who didn’t realize that it wasn’t like theater. You didn’t have to stay in character all the time,” he says. “When I first read the part, I could see that nobody wanted this guy to be there. It just hit me that he was whiny.” His constant demand for attention, his high-pitched cries of “Sally!” and his anger at everyone else for being ambulatory make him one of the most despicable handicapped people in film history. He’s the only one who almost seems to deserve his death.
