Alex Winter

by Keith Bearden | Published September 1, 1994

In support of the premise that lots of great movies were never given the advertising, patience, or financial push to find their audience, and that "venturesome audiences are finding that many commercial failures are funnier, sexier, more dashing, as well as provocative and penetrating, as their moneymaking counterparts," in 1990, The National Society of Film Critics published Produced And Abandoned: The Best Movies You've Never Seen.

In it were a collection of reviews of films ranging from long-time critical favorites such as John Huston's Fat City and Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ to more esoteric winners like the Canadian psycho-pop screamer The Stepfather and By Design, an unreleased lesbian sex comedy starring Patty Duke(!). In the four years hence, the number of excellent films that have suffered a similar fate could almost fill up another volume. No such list from '93 would be complete without Freaked, the debut feature from 28-year-old writer/directors Tom Stern and Alex Winter who gained notoriety for their hyperactive, Tex Averyesque short films Cherub and Squeal of Death.

The multi-talented Alex Winter freaks out in his new movie.

Freaked has co-director Winter (best known for his acting, in particular his co-starring role in the two Bill & Ted films) playing Ricky Coogan, a smarmy TV actor who lands a big buck job promoting a dangerous pesticide in the fictional South American country of San Flan. Along the way, he and a friend pick up a naive environmentalist (Megan Ward) and wander into a roadside freak show run by Eligah C. Skuggs (Randy Quaid), a crazed Colonel Tom-style carnival hack, and his cavalcade of artificially made mutants, including Winter's Bill & Ted co-hort Keanu Reeves in an unaccredited role as Ortiz the dog-boy (which, no insult intended, marks his best performance so far captured on film). Also featured are Bobcat Goldthwait as a man who's head has been transformed into a sock puppet, and The Frogman-a French-speaking man in a wet suit and snorkel. What could've been just another bad cameo-laden (Morgan Fairchild, Larry `Bud' Melman, Brooke Shields) pre-made "cult comedy" (ala Adam Rifkin's disastrous Dark Backward) is rescued by Stern and Winter's strong visual style and Zuckeresque machine gun wit. While at times sinking to the level of Police Academy-style juvenilia (feces and throw-up jokes are strictly for the mall-walker audience), Freaked is more often than not bright, genuinely surprising, and very, very funny. And really, any movie where Mr. T plays a bearded lady is automatically worth a $3 rental fee.

While New Jersey-bred Winter has been acting since childhood, including stints on Broadway, his ambitions were strongest in filmmaking. Enrolling in NYU film school, he met Stern, another freshman, with whom he found a similar sense of humor and shared disdain for the "bitter, would-be filmmakers" running the East Coast's top film school.

"Film school was basically a load of horseshit," Winter says with typical frankness, about his decision to drop out his junior year.

"We were there, not getting anything out of our teachers, we just were using equipment, and frankly, NYU was too expensive just to be there to use the equipment. I left and went back into acting to supplement our film stuff. Tom stayed on to graduate and we just kept cranking out films together."

Moving to Los Angeles with Stern in 1986, the two busied themselves by shooting shorts and music videos (for artists like Butthole Surfers, Ice Cube and Red Hot Chili Peppers) and writing spec scripts, while Winter was doing acting to pay the bills.

"We constantly shot or wrote for about eight years," Winter remembers, "before we got to do Freaked."

After Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure cleaned up at the box office (after sitting on the shelf due to studio indifference), Winter was approached by MTV to "be their afternoon VJ as Ted." After politely declining ("I told them no fucking way"), Winter used his "in" status with the network to pitch what was to become The Idiot Box, a limited run series of Winter & Stern material with videos sandwiched in.

In a Hollywood constantly grasping to connect with the all-important youth market, MTV gets studio execs interested, and The Idiot Box (which Winter regards as his and Stern's most successful collaboration and "the most offensive thing MTV has ever aired") was the leg up the duo needed to launch a feature project. They found a kindred spirit in former Fox head Joe Roth.

"Roth really did see things about the Idiot Box that were really hitting the nerve," he says. "Very caustic, very black humor, the underlying theme that America was basically turning into a big pile of shit, but not in a trendy, cool, disaffected kind of way - our work always has an upside to it. He saw it as a healthy, interesting alternative to a lot of the other youth comedies going around."

The two presented Roth with a revised edition of Freaks, an old spec script they had written with Canadian Tim Burns, with whom Stern hooked up while working a brief stint on TV's Jim Henson Hour.

"Screaming Mad George (make-up effects artist) had come up with these amazing character sketches of the freaks, and we went in there with them and a copy of The Idiot Box and lied our asses off about the bands we were gonna have on the soundtrack, and lo and behold we had a movie deal."

Fox put up five million of the total budget (the remaining five million coming from foreign partners), and gave them a 44-day shooting schedule. After losing their original title early on to Ted Turner (who owns the rights to Tod Browning's 1931 classic), various titles floated through the grapevine during shooting.

"We shot 'non-union, and shooting non-union in Hollywood is kind of like walking into Harlem with a 'Fuck Malcolm X' T-shirt on," Winter explains.

"They are vicious. They (union people) will find you, and if they can't shut you down they will throw rocks at your set, or fly planes over your location to screw up your sound. They are evil people. We had publicized the project in pre-production as Freaks, so we came up with the title Very Special People to throw them off our trail, make them think it's some TV movie with Mickey Rooney as a retard spilling pea soup all over his shirt."

After settling on the title Hideous Mutant Freaks, which "the studio thought sounded too much like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they came up with Freaked, which was "OK but makes it sound like a Cheech and Chong movie. "

It is common, even fashionable, for a feature comedy to wildly overshoot, creating gags and whole scenes on set to keep humor's natural spontaneity alive. Coming from a background of self-financed shorts and low-budget music videos, Stern and Winter had other ideas.

"Film is a very chaotic medium. There's only so much improvisation that you can do. The cameraman's gotta see what the actor's gonna do, the sound and lighting guy's gotta know you're gonna do line A at point C, you got an actor who wants to change all that around, you spend half a day trying to set up tech for these changes, and then they're gonna wanna change it all back at the end of the day ... you're screwed. When your budget's tight, unless you wanna have it look like a TV movie you have no room for looseness - you have to block people around like props.

Spontaneity is real important in comedy, but our scriptwriting process was loose, and we looked real hard for actors who got the humor in our material and could be spontaneous and go with the comedy."

For an independent filmmaker working under the dreaded studio system, Winter describes the shooting as idyllic. "When I die, I'll look back at this shoot under Joe Roth and say it was probably the best moviemaking experience I've ever had. As an actor or whatever, I've never seen a studio so supportive and casual. Roth saw our first cut, loved it, wanted to work with us to find the right audience, and two days later I read in the Hollywood Reporter that he's gone. Then the shit just hit the fan. It was that simple.

"It's basically a puppet institution," Winter says about the current studio power structure. "Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox, wanted to have more power in the movie-making business, and decided that Roth was the director's friend. Besides giving the world Home Alone, he also green lighted Naked Lunch and Barton Fink, which didn't make a dime for anyone. So he gets this guy from Fox TV, Peter Chernin, to do his bidding and move away from this wacky, weird Roth stuff."

In the March 7, 1994, Los Angeles Times, Fox executive vice president, Tom Sherak, who runs distribution, denies management changeover had anything to do with the studio's dumping of Freaked, saying that "the film didn't work ... we tested the film ... but we couldn't get an audience to come."

"First of all, they tested it with young teens and the film is very much for the college audience," Winter says."Also, you test screen a rough cut, which especially for a comedy, is a disaster, the timing is all wrong, and you put the whole kitchen sink in. Rough cuts play like a lead balloon. It's good to get an idea how the movie plays. But that's not why studios do it. They are there to decide the fate of your movie. Because these people have no power of or taste, they rely on this Fallbrook, California pre-teen mall theater audience, who see it for free under very alien circumstances, to tell them whether your film is good or not. Those comment cards are a joke. These kids think they have to be Siskel and Ebert and say something bad about what they saw in order to not sound stupid."

Last fall, Freaked had it's official theatrical release. Didn't catch it at your local multiplex? Well, no surprise. The studio struck two(!) 35mm prints of the film, as opposed to thousands for it's major summer releases. While it's next to impossible for a major studio to lose money on a $10 million movie, the message being sent to the flickers was clear. Freaked was the black sheep of the Fox family.

"When they did what they called the New York release, they had made two awful posters to put up in front of theaters," Winter laughs. "There was a lot of interest in it, so we were doing all these different things for publicity, and we're running around town, carrying these two posters with us, putting them up, and then carefully taking them down and moving on-it was insane!"

Having had his labor of love project effectively orphaned by it's studio parents, Winter uses his experience to reflect on the tenuous, factionalized state the motion picture industry now resides in.

"Hollywood is kind of lost right now. It used to be a very clear cut capitalist organization, where you had your Louis B. Mayers and Jack Warners, who were like carpet salesman or oil magnates. They made movies, and the better movie they made, the more money they made back. It was very hands-on with the writer, producer and directors. Now it's run by agents, studio executives who are very young and out of business school and don't know anything about movies at all. They don't trust their tastes because they aren't moviegoers themselves. They're scared, and they don't know what they're doing.

"It used to be you'd have a knowledgeable studio head like Jack Warner or even Roger Corman who would put his foot down and tell you what to make your movie about this year," he continues. "Or sometimes a director was allowed to have that vision and it worked.

Now you have 25,000 people with an executive producer credit, and it goes through a development company and agents and a distribution company and everybody wants to put in their creative two cents so they will feel powerful, but what you get is a mess every time. If there was anything good about it at the inception it's all been cooked away by the time it hits the screen; it's a flavorless paste. Diplomacy and democracy just do not work in film or any other art form. You need a bottom line theme that is very singular."

If anything, the Freaked story proves the unheralded power of the fringe film press. Good press in fan journals like Film Threat and Fangoria have generated enough excitement (or at least name recognition) that an otherwise doomed-to-video-obscurity release is doing more than decent business since it's April 20th VHS & Laserdisc release. The story for Stern and Winter, both of whom have moved on to separate script writing projects, has an upbeat hook-people are seeing their movie, if only on TV.

Winter takes a rare breath and pauses to reflect when asked for advice for filmmakers attempting to work within the Hollywood system.

"Anybody who is getting into the business now, and has integrity, and doesn't want to end up making Driving Miss Daisy, should really know that it's a fucking struggle like they wouldn't believe and that they'd better be Alexander the goddamn Conqueror. Because it is like trying to move a mountain to try to do something that is independent, not just artsy fartsy, but with a singular, strong point of view, within the current industry system. Unless it's just sickeningly commercial. I've thought that was the way it was on the outside, and now that I'm on the inside I've found it to be totally true."

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