It’s about love — losing somebody that you really love. And now that I think about it, the older brother really was like a father-figure to the young Tim Matheson character. I wasn’t conscious of that at all at the time, but maybe because of all the emotional issues that were going on, I had a much deeper personal connection to the end of the movie than I realized.
In most ghost stories, you’ve got to somehow resolve the spirit’s conflicts so that they can move on. Once they move on, you know you’re never going to see them again. I was choosing life over death.
Anytime I’ve had dreams of my father or my mother, I’m aware in the dream that they are dead and I’m dreaming. But I don’t want the dream to end because I’ve got an opportunity to be with them in that realm for a certain amount of time and it’s so wonderful. It’s a bizarre thing to sit here and talk about it or intellectualize it, because in a dream you’re not supposed to be aware that you’re dreaming. How does that work? I really do feel the same emotions that I would in life if I saw them again. If they suddenly walk through the door, I’m like, “Don’t leave yet…I have so much that I want to ask you. We need more time.” It’s interesting how the mind works.
I guess I think of dreams as “movies.” Some have a great ending and some have a horrible ending. Sometimes the film breaks and you don’t get to the end.
I have one more thing that I’d like to talk about before we take a break. I understand you were at one point attached to a sequel to The Birds…
Did they end up making that project into a sequel?
There was a sequel on Showtime in 1994, called The Birds II: Land’s End.
When I was involved, they were calling it The Birds 3-D. CBS was going to do it. It had a huge production company behind it, and they were going to do a marketing tie-in with 7-11, where people would go to 7-11 to get the 3-D glasses. They even talked about a sponsorship deal, where the commercials would also be in 3-D. It was this huge innovative gadget/gimmick.
The writer I worked with on that was Robert Eisele, who wrote The Great Debaters — a really nice, smart guy. When the two of us first got together, a script already existed but it was too derivative of the original. We went back to the short story that Hitchcock had used, which was cool because it all took place in a cabin. It was about one family, trapped alone, and they heard on the radio what was going on everywhere else. We knew [the producers] weren’t going to go for something that simple, but we wanted to create that sense of claustrophobia. So we were in sync about what we wanted to do. And the producers said, “No, it’s got to be massive, with birds flying into traffic and all this shit.” And I’m thinking, That’s not scary. So eventually we both left the project. I guess it ended up on Showtime? I never saw it.
If you tackle this kind of job, you should be able to say to yourself, “I can make a really great standalone movie that will maintain the spirit of the original.” Robert and I both walked away because we saw that it was not going to be that.
It sounds like you were on the right track, because that sense of claustrophobia really is what works about the original Hitchcock film. You have this huge apocalyptic canvas — international crisis — but the story is carefully grounded in the reality of a handful of characters. It boggles my mind to think that the financiers of a sequel or remake wouldn’t recognize that.
All it takes is somebody’s twenty-two-year-old assistant to say, in passing, “I just saw the third Star Wars and there’s this awesome sequence where…” And that sticks in some executive’s head as he’s reading the script or looking at the dailies, and then he says to himself, “You know, this thing just isn’t big enough.” What they add is not even their idea. It just seemed like a good idea to them at that particular moment. A lot of times, you’ve got 200 random people telling you how to make the movie…and everybody has completely different ideas, depending on what film they just saw or what Variety says is making money this week.
As a filmmaker, you have to try to figure out which notes are actually good ones and which are just coming from people who need to justify their paycheck. Of course, if you dismiss the wrong note, you’ll hear: “Well, do you know whose note that was? That one actually came from The Man himself, and if he says something you’ve got to make that work. You can forget all the other notes…” “But these other notes are actually good…” “No, forget them!”
The bottom line is we’re all trying to make something good, but you can’t be in sync with 200 people. That’s why it’s a miracle — really a miracle — whenever any movie works from beginning to end. When that happens, I always sit through the credits, as does most of the audience, because you just don’t want to leave the presence of that movie. Why go back to reality? We’re in magic time here.
14. Adam West played the dual role of Bruce Wayne/Batman in the TV series Batman (1966-1968).
Tom and Raymar on the set of One Dark Night.
Tom and Mike Hawes on May 22, 1982.
Storyboard art from Jason Lives! (Paramount, 1986).
Jason Voorhees (C.J. Graham) and Nancy McLoughlin.
Tom and Nancy McLoughlin on the set of Jason Lives!
Storyboards for the “heart attack” scene in Jason Lives! (Paramount, 1986).
Tony Goldwin and Nancy McLoughlin in Jason Lives! (Paramount, 1986).
Emmanuelle Béart in Date with an Angel (DeLaurentiis, 1987).
Communicating with God in Date with an Angel (DeLaurentiis, 1987).
Emmanuelle Béart in Date with an Angel [DeLaurentiis, 1987).
Tom and Phoebe Cates on the set of Date with an Angel (DeLaurentiis, 1987).
Tom with Lisa Jakub and Robert Oliveri on the set of “The Playhouse.”
Tom inside “The Playhouse.”
The director admires his creation on the set of Sometimes They Come Back.
Brooke Adams, Tim Matheson and Tom McLoughlin on the set of Sometimes They Come Back.
The McLoughlin family on the set of Sometimes They Come Back.
Shane’s first industry job, on Sometimes They Come Back.
Tom and best friend Steven Banks.
Tom with actor Robert Rusler.
Tom fulfills his mother’s dream for him in a (unused) cameo for Sometimes They Come Back.
Part IV: Men & Women
Real-life monsters / The Luminol scene / Alison’s legacy / A Radio Shack future / The female version of Taxi Driver / One of God’s true children / The battle for ambiguity / Directing Kirk Douglas / Coppola’s advice
FILMOGRAPHY
IN A CHILD’S NAME (CBS, 1991)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY BILL PHILLIPS AND CHARLES WALKER.
BASED ON A BOOK BY PETER MAAS
STARRING VALERIE BERTINELLI, MICHAEL ONTKEAN, CHRIS MELONI, DAVID HUDDLESTON, LOUISE FLETCHER
True story of a woman’s fight for custody of her murdered sister’s child.
SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR: THE ALISON GERTZ STORY (A.K.A. FATAL LOVE) (ABC, 1992)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY DEBORAH JOY LEVINE
STARRING MOLLY RINGWALD, MARTIN LANDAU, LEE GRANT, PERRY KING
True story of a young woman who became an AIDS activist after learning that she was infected with HIV.
THE FIRE NEXT TIME (CBS, 1993)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY JAMES S. HENERSON
STARRING CRAIG T. NELSON, BONNIE BEDELIA, RICHARD FARNSWORTH, JURGEN PROCHNOW
A family struggles to stay together in a future where extreme global warming has created chaos.
MURDER OF INNOCENCE (CBS, 1993)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY PHILIP ROSENBERG
BASED ON A BOOK BY GEORGE KAPLAN, GEORGE PAPAJOHN AND ERIC ZORN
STARRING VALERIE BERTINELLI, STEPHEN CAFFREY, JERRY HARDIN, MILLIE PERKINS
True story of a woman’s descent into madness, culminating in a killing spree.
THE YARN PRINCESS (ABC, 1994)
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DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY DALENE YOUNG
STARRING JEAN SMART, ROBERT PASTORELLI, DENNIS BOUTSIKARIS
A mentally handicapped woman fights to retain custody of her children.
LEAVE OF ABSENCE (NBC, 1994)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY BETTY GOLDBERG. BASED ON A STORY BY POLLY BERGEN
STARRING BRIAN DENNEHY, JACQUELINE BISSET, BLYTHE DANNER
A man leaves his wife to have an affair with a dying woman.
THE LIES BOYS TELL (A.K.A. TAKE ME HOME AGAIN) (NBC, 1994)
TELEPLAY BY ERNEST THOMPSON. BASED ON A NOVEL BY LAMAR HERRIN
STARRING KIRK DOUGLAS, CRAIG T. NELSON
A dying man convinces his estranged son to drive him to his childhood home.
JOURNEY (CBS, 1995)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY PATRICIA MACLACHLAN, ADAPTED FROM HER OWN NOVEL.
STARRING JASON ROBARDS, BRENDA FRICKER, MAX POMERANC, MEG TILLY
A grandfather tries to connect with his introverted grandson after the boy is abandoned by his mother.
Your work in the horror genre seems like a jumping off point for the stories you told in the 1990s. Your next group of movies is based very firmly in reality and each one is essentially about conquering some kind of real-life fear.
My way of looking at my career — and I can’t be truly objective because I’m still in the middle of it — is that the beginning was about the kind of movies that I loved as a kid and still love: gothic horror, screwball comedies, Capra-esque fantasy. The horror stuff was about fears related to death and the afterlife and the supernatural. Then, when I got into the TV movies, it became more about real-life monsters that don’t just die and go away: serial killers, AIDS, global warming, mental illness…
Instead of dealing with fantasy horrors, you’re dealing with everyday horrors that exist in the world around us, and in human nature…
Yes. I used to believe that we all are born morally intact and then somewhere along the way we could get corrupted. If you do something horrible — if you hurt somebody or kill somebody — then I figured you’re going to lay awake at night, unable to rest, feeling horribly messed up…wandering the streets, wondering if people can tell that there’s something wrong with you. I figured that’s your punishment. You’re going to suffer.
Now I realize that people who are capable of doing those things are also capable of convincing themselves that they didn’t do it. Total sociopath behavior. Now that’s scary! Because what’s to stop somebody from doing awful things if they truly believe that there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing? Sociopaths can justify what they’re doing. They decide it’s okay to rip someone off if that person has more money than they do, or that it’s okay to treat someone like an animal because they’re ethnicity makes them “inferior.” In life, you meet people who completely believe those things, and you try to get through to them but you can’t. And sometimes it gets worse as years go by.
There is a monologue in Mississippi Burning where the Gene Hackman character is trying to explain to Willem Defoe why people are racist, because Willem Defoe just cannot understand it. His character is telling this story about when he was a boy. He was driving with his father and he noticed an old black man who owned a horse. The black man could use the horse to plow his field, whereas the boy’s father had to do it by hand. Hackman says, “Even as a boy I could see that my father was not happy about this guy having a horse. I remember a few weeks later that horse mysteriously died.” Later he saw the black man plowing the field by hand and he looked at his dad, and he knew his father had killed that horse. He could see it in his eyes. And he could see that his father knew that he knew. And his father said, “Son, if you’re no better than a nigger, what good are you?” Some people need to feel that they are somehow superior to somebody else, just to have some twisted sense of self-respect. The black culture was so hated in that part of the country at that time that his father actually believed that he was better. It was bred into the culture.
Kids learn those things from their parents. They watch their fathers beat their mothers, and they think that’s what a man does. Then those boys, when they get a girlfriend, think they can “own” a girl, and that they have the right to hit them. And the girls allow it because they’ve been around that kind of thing too and, for them, it’s culturally acceptable. This is my long-winded way of saying that those kinds of monsters are deeply imbedded in so many people’s lives. We deal with them on a daily basis — from the cops and politicians who become corrupt because they’re given too much power to the lover who suddenly betrays you. The most interesting thing to me is trying to understand the subjective point of view of those monsters, instead of just telling the facts. I want to see the world, cinematically, through their eyes. That makes the story far more emotional for us as viewers.
That takes a lot of digging. A lot of times, it means delving into people’s childhoods…
With storytelling, you have to decide where you want to begin the tale. Usually you begin at the worst incident in a person’s life so that you grab the audience’s attention — like the opening of Sunset Boulevard, which begins with the dead man’s narration. So we literally know, through the whole movie, that he’s going to end up dead in the swimming pool. What we want to know is how he got to that point.
How did you get involved with In a Child’s Name?
After Sometimes They Come Back, CBS offered me this miniseries starring Valerie Bertinelli. To be honest, I don’t watch much television. I very seldom follow TV series and I find it impossible to watch movies with commercial breaks. So at the time, the TV world was something that I was completely divorced from. Along came this script based on a Peter Maas book, about a woman who was trying to prove that her sister’s husband killed her sister. The main thrust of the story was about a baby that was going to be raised by the murderer’s parents. It was the classic “somebody stole my baby” story. That wasn’t something that I felt I could identify with or emotionally connect with. But then I thought it would be an interesting challenge. I wanted the chance to tell a true story based on actual people.
There was also a scene in the movie that really appealed to my dark side. Louise Fletcher and David Huddleston [the actors playing the parents of the killer] are in the bedroom where the murder happened, and the killer has cleaned up so well after the murder that nobody has found any traces of blood in the room…until the forensic investigators use Luminol. [15] When I got to that sequence, the horror fantasy part of my brain kicked in. I didn’t just want to show a little blood. I wanted to make this a bloodbath — almost like what I did in Jason Lives, with buckets of blood covering the walls of the cabin where one of the girls was killed.
Basically what happens is that the two characters go in and put the baby in the crib, then turn off the lights. Gradually you start to see this green glow appear on Louise Fletcher’s face. She looks around and we cut to individual shots of all these hand smears and splatter marks on the wall, but instead of blood it’s Luminol, which is a glowing green color. Then the camera pulls back and you see that the walls are covered. You never see any red blood, and obviously you haven’t seen the murder, but you can imagine how bad it was. We ended up putting that scene at the conclusion of the first night [of the miniseries], which was a Sunday night.
On Monday morning, it seemed like everybody was talking about it. I walked into the 7-11 and somebody was talking about it; I went to the dentist and somebody was talking about it; it was in the newspaper…and then the phone calls started coming in from people saying, “You scared the shit out of me.” The film kicked ass on Tuesday night [when the second half aired] in terms of ratings, so that proved how many people nationwide had been talking about it. The second night was the highest rated television movie of the year.
I had no idea that it would get that kind of reaction. In fact, I apologized to the producers when I handed in
my cut. I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand this genre. I just did what I could.” And I almost got fired over that scene with the Luminol. The network executives were asking themselves, “Why did we hire a horror director? We’re going to have to re-shoot this scene.” I wouldn’t re-shoot it.
When I’ve talked to people over the years, they always say, “In a Child’s Name…Is that the one with the green stuff?” That’s what they remember. That’s what kept them awake. That image made such an impact. I met Kim Basinger three years later and she told me, “I didn’t fall asleep until three o’clock that morning.” Anybody I came across that saw this thing, they’d get this look of horror on their face when they realized…“You did that?” It got to them because they weren’t expecting it. It’s exactly what we’ve been talking about — the audience got so wrapped up in the characters and the realism of the story, that they were really shocked by this horrible, horrible image. The combination of all these elements created one hell of a reaction.
And that was only the mid-point of the miniseries.
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 11
