They Came. They Sawed.
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Jim Siedow took his wife and two of his three children to a downtown Houston theater to watch it after someone told him it was “the worst movie they’d ever seen.” “Later on,” he once said, “we saw it again at a drive-in, and I made a point of letting the people in the next car see who I was. As they drove away, the girl in the car said, ‘You were horrible!’ But the way she said it, she meant the character was horrible, so it was a compliment.” Ed Neal watched the movie repeatedly at the Village Theater in Austin, where he would scare unsuspecting patrons by tapping them on the shoulder while he was acting crazy on-screen: “They finally asked me not to come back anymore.”
In its first eight years of release, as Chainsaw continued to play drive-ins, overseas territories, and midnight-movie houses (often on a double bill with David Lynch’s Eraserhead), the $60,000 hippie horror movie grossed upward of $50 million, according to figures cobbled together by the Los Angeles Times. After an eight-year censorship fight in France, the film opened on the Champs Elysées in 1982 and had grosses like those for Superman. For a 1981 re-release by New Line Cinema, the gross was more than $6 million, an unheard-of amount of money for a seven-year-old film that had already been released on video. Chainsaw would end up being seen in more than ninety countries, sometimes dubbed, sometimes subtitled, sometimes marketed in an almost unrecognizable way. (In Italy it was called Non Aprite Quella Porta, or Don’t Open That Door.) Its appeal, for better or worse, was universal.
Enter the Wiseguys
AFTER ALL THIS COMMOTION, it was natural that the actors and crew members—many of whom had waived their salaries in exchange for a percentage of the movie—would say, “When do the first checks come in?” Calls were placed—first to Hooper, then to Henkel, then to anyone who would listen. “Three months, no check,” says Ed Neal. “Six months, no check. Nine months, a check for $28.45. We were angry.”
Hooper, reclusive and nonconfrontational by nature, fled from the problem, which exacerbated tensions. The actors felt bamboozled. They were startled to find out that Vortex, the company run by Hooper and Henkel, owned only half the movie, a fact some of the actors said they were not told in the beginning. Parsley’s M.A.B. Inc. owned the other half. That meant that an actor’s .5 percentage was actually worth only .25. Then there was this mystery company, the one run by Joe Longley, that suddenly turned up owning 19 percent of Vortex and demanding that it receive its investment money before anyone else was paid.
In fact, the cast and crew had no idea how bad things really were. Although Variety, the trade newspaper, was reporting that Chainsaw had grossed upward of $12 million in less than a year, Bryanston’s statements showed only about $1 million. One explanation is that, according to a Village Voice article, the heads of Bryanston, brothers Lou and Joe Peraino, were both members of the Colombo crime family. The Perainos had gotten into the film business, according to the FBI, by extorting the rights to Deep Throat from director Gerard Damiano, but since then they had acquired a legitimate reputation by hiring Hollywood veterans for their West Coast office, where the real marketing and distribution was done.
Unaware of this, investor Robert Kuhn had taken to calling the Perainos “the Piranha brothers.” And after repeatedly requesting an accounting of Chainsaw’s profits, he, Skaaren, Henkel, and Parsley demanded a meeting with them in New York in 1975. “Skaaren and I went over to their offices,” says Kuhn. “Henkel and Parsley stayed in the hotel. We waited a long time, and then Lou Peraino invited us into his office. On either side of him were two great big guys who looked like stereotypical thugs. We sat down and said, ‘We’re here to audit the books.’ He said, ‘You’re not gonna audit the books.’ I said, ‘In that case we would have no choice but to sue you.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have enough balls to sue me.’” There was a long silence as neither man said anything. Looming behind Peraino was a huge painting of Saint Sebastian, gouts of blood pouring out of his body, his face twisted in agony as he died with dozens of arrows mangling his flesh.
Kuhn did in fact file a lawsuit in Austin, and after a little legal wrangling, the case ended up in New York federal court. But by the time it was docketed and set for argument, “it became obvious,” says Kuhn, “that the assets were not gonna be readily available.” The Perainos had financed a string of bad, money-losing movies, and their company owed so much money by this time that all the prints were being held hostage by labs and subdistributors who wanted to be paid. Kuhn started threatening suits, filing suits, and otherwise causing problems for everyone who had Chainsaw prints, but he didn’t make much headway. And sometime in 1976, the Peraino brothers simply vanished. The result was years of litigation among the Texas investors.
The fact that none of the cast and crew ever made any money off Chainsaw was a huge disappointment, though one that might have been tolerable had many of them gone on to succeed. But despite the massive hit Chainsaw became, nearly everyone associated with it was somewhat inexplicably shunned by Hollywood. Some of the Chainsaw cast and crew took the film off their résumés, knowing that somehow it tainted their reputations. In 1976 Marilyn Burns landed the role of Linda Kasabian in the CBS production of Helter Skelter, from Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the Manson family, but that turned out to be her last performance of any stature. She now works for a telephone company in Houston. Teri McMinn also decamped for Hollywood but found that “people were very nonplussed” by a résumé with Chainsaw on it. She knocked around in soaps, doing “under-fives” (day parts consisting of fewer than five lines), and finally gave up on Los Angeles in 1984, at the age of 32. For about a decade she ran Baubles and Weeds, a specialty florist in Austin. Paul Partain took two more small film roles—in Race With the Devil and Rolling Thunder—then left acting in 1979 to become a salesman in the electronics industry.
Gunnar Hansen had a small cameo in The Demon Lover in 1976, then headed back to his childhood home in Maine and dedicated himself to writing poetry and nonfiction. He returned to the screen briefly in 1988 in the ultra-low-budget Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. Since then he’s appeared in seventeen direct-to-video movies, and he supplements his income with appearances at horror conventions, where he is one of the more popular celebrities, along with Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) and Kane Hodder (Jason). Ed Neal held out hope of joining Hooper in Los Angeles, but that became impossible when he became the leader of the disgruntled, unpaid Vortex shareholders. Today he is one of America’s top dubbing actors for Japanese films and CD-ROM games, playing roles such as Dr. Robotnik and the President in Sonic the Hedgehog, the evil old priest in Ninja Resurrection, and the insane planet in MAPS. And Allen Danziger, for whom the movie “was always just a goof,” spent ten years as a social worker, then started a singing-telegram and party-service company called Three Ring Service. For a while he performed at birthday parties as Tyrone the Turkey, who played the clarinet.
Bob Burns, the art director, did become well known within the film community for his work on Chainsaw, especially his “bone room” and the barbecue stand where the “cook” works. He used some of the Chainsawprops when he was hired by Wes Craven for yet another cannibal movie, The Hills Have Eyes, and used some of the same animal bones for The Howling. For years he kept most of the Leatherface paraphernalia in his house. And he was always on the fringes of the exploitation world, working on Tourist Trap with Chuck Connors, making a Klaus Kinksi fild in Italy for felloe UT grad David Schmoeller. He became a pack-rat collector of macabre props from horor films. Disillusioned with modern Austin, he moved to Seguin, where he covered his house floor-to-ceiling with his collection. It was there that, after being diagnosed with cancer, he committed suicide in May of this year.
Legacy of Evil
FOR HOOPER AND HENKEL, at least, the financial mess of Chainsaw had seemed far, far away, especially since their talents were in such demand immediately after the film’s release. In late 1976 they moved into an office on the back lot of Universal Pictures, where they had salaries and a writing-directing-producing contract for their next three pictures. Of course, as with all such deals, Universal wasn’t required to actually make those three movies, but for the time being Hooper and Henkel basked in the knowledge that they shared the same back lot with Steven Spielberg, then the hottest director in the world, and William Friedkin, the number one horror director on the strength of The Exorcist.
