Late Night Classics – Poltergeist III

It seems like the Poltergeist franchise has been engulfed with dissention and tragedy since day one. Fans still bicker about who really directed the original film, was it Tobe Hooper or Steven Spielberg? Then, of course, there are the many mysterious deaths that have happened to the many actors along the way. That stuff doesn’t interest me one bit, so I won’t be concentrating on that. Sorry to disappoint anybody out there, but I don’t write for TMZ, and I don’t believe in that dispicable kind of journalism of disrespecting people who are not longer with us. So, if you are looking for that National Enquirer kind of writing, you are barking up the wrong tree.

I know for a fact that there are numerous fans who are ‘in the closet’ about their admiration for Poltergeist III. It’s by no means a perfect flick, but if you watch it now, without all of the claptrap gossip that burdened the film upon its initial release, you will see a solid horror film with remarkable special effects. Like many of John Carpenter’s films, Poltergeist III has found its audience years later, and has attained cult status amongst the horror community.

Has anyone seen Raw Meat, Dead and Buried, Vice Squad, or Wanted: Dead or Alive? If you haven’t, you are missing out on some great cinematic treasures. They are all directed by Gary Sherman, the man responsible for Poltergeist III.

Jason Bene: Poltergeist is a modern day classic, and although the sequel is flawed, it did manage to introduce the creepy Reverend Kane. For Poltergeist III, did you feel like it was important to take Carol Anne out of the suburbs and put her in this 21st Century haunted house?

Gary Sherman: I have much more of a fascination with urban than suburban. I’m an urban kind of guy. I like the city or I like the country. To me, suburbia has the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. In the city you have culture. There are a lot of negatives being in the inner city, but I find even the negatives positive. I like cities. If I am not going to be in the city then I want to be out in the middle of nowhere, which is where I am right now.

Jason Bene: You pull off some great slight of hand using mirrors. Can you talk about how you used those in the film?

Gary Sherman: I began my cinematic career in an optical house, something that doesn’t have to exist anymore because of digital. I love technology and I love digital. I’ve been a computer nerd since I had my first IBM Model 50, which was long ago. It actually had a hard drive compacity of fifty megabites, which we thought was pretty unbelievable. I had been involved in getting into digital from the beginning, but I started way back in analog when even doing a dissolve was a manual thing that you had to do by overlapping several pieces of film, then adjusting the exposure on each frame. I learned a lot doing all of that stuff analog. I learned a lot about just what it takes to combine images on film.

When I was in college, I went to the Institute of Design at IIT, which is an art school on the campus of a technical school. IIT is like MIT or Cal Tech, but right on the campus is an art school. In order to graduate from IIT you had to take science courses as a minor because we graduated with a Bachelor’s in Science degree. I took my minor in physics and I specialized in opticals and I learned a lot about lenses. I worked in an optical house with multiple head projectors with split beams where you project through a prism with several projectors, and then the split images get combined into another camera. I also had done a television movie for NBC called Mysterious Two, which very well could have been the first time that CGI was used in a television movie. A friend of mine in Bolder, Colorado was a scientist who was working in computer generated images, and with his help we created a spacecraft as a computer generated image and then had to figure out how to transfer that to film because there was no way to do it back then. I won’t go into the whole thing because we can be here for an hour if I just talked about how we created that image. That was the very beginnings of CGI.

I had been asked to do Poltergesit II: The Other Side but I was busy on another project at the time and I couldn’t do it; then Jay Kanter and Alan Ladd Jr. came back to me and asked me about doing Poltergeist III. They said we want you to write, produce, and direct the whole thing and make it. I said, “Can I do something ego-driven on this film?” I want to do it without any optical FX or CGI whatsoever. I want to turn the stage into an optical camera, and I want to do all of the FX live so the actors are actually involved in the FX. That’s basically what we did. It was unbelievably complicated to do and unfortunately it made the shooting schedule extremely long and none of us had a clue that Heather [O'Rourke] was going to pass away before we finished. There were a bunch of FX that still needed to be shot and we never got to shoot them. Poltergeist III is probably the least favorite of all of my movies. It shouldn’t have been, and wouldn’t have been, but Heather’s death turned it all around. I didn’t end up getting to make the film I wanted to make and the memory of Heather’s death is not one of the more pleasant memories in my life. I was a pallbearer at her funeral and it was probably one of the worst days of my life.

Jason Bene: I love how the ‘The Other Side’ is not fire and brimstone but how it is arctic and frozen. Does that have to do with the supernatural forces devouring heat and energy?

Gary Sherman: It’s maybe just my own conceit. I’m not a very spiritual person and I’m definitely not a religious person. I’ve always thought of ‘The Other Side’ as being a black hole, and therefore sucking energy. When you absorb energy you end up with cold. That’s just my own feeling of what the ’The Other Side’ is, if there is an ‘other side’, I think it’s very cold over there.

Jason Bene: Tom Skerritt makes a reference to Carrie to Nancy Allen, who is, of course, in the Brian DePalma masterpiece.

Gary Sherman: What the heck. When you got Nancy who was married to Brian at the beginning of our show, and was divorced from Brian by the end of the show, one had to deal with it. Tom lives to joke and you got to let Tom run with things sometimes. He has an incredible sense of humor, he’s a very funny guy. Everytime he got at Nancy, she didn’t know how to take it most of the time.

Jason Bene: I met Zelda Rubinstein at a screening a few years back and she was a firecracker. What was it like to work with her?

Gary Sherman: I adored Zelda. Zelda was one of my favorite people on the planet. I happened to be working with Zelda when her mother passed away and I was working with Zelda when my mother passed away. When my mom passed away Zelda put her arms around me and said, “You shouldn’t be without a Jewish mother, so now you have another one.” The rest of her life Zelda was my surrogate Jewish mother. We talked all of the time and last year I flew into Los Angeles for her birthday, which I am really glad I did, because as you well know it was her last birthday. I miss her.

Jason Bene: This was the film debut for Lara Flynn Boyle. Did you see a star in the making at the time?

Gary Sherman: This was the second time I worked with Laura. I cast Laura in a pilot I did for ABC just before we did Poltergeist III. I cast Laura in a singular role and she blew me away. I thought she was absolutely an incredible talent. When we started casting for Poltergeist III I immediately called her in for the part. I taped her and showed it to the studio and they said go with it, and we did. Obviously, yes, I did see her as an up and comer.

Jason Bene: As a kid I bought into the whole curse that was associated with the Poltergeist franchise. Now as an adult I realize things happen in life and you have no control of them. The loss of Heather O’Rourke must have been devastating for everyone involved. Do you think the film should have been shelved or was it a case of the show must go on and let’s do it for Heather?

Gary Sherman: I’ve been interviewed about that a lot of times. Basically, we were going to shut down the show. The day that Heather died I was in Chicago doing some pre-production on a television show I was producing. All of Poltergeist III was shot in Chicago, but we were going to shoot the end sequence of the film in Los Angeles. We needed about forty or fifty special effects technicians because of the fact that we were shooting it all live, which was about ten times as many as we could pull together in Chicago. We needed pretty skilled people, so it basically became more economical for us to move the production to Los Angeles instead of bringing hundreds of people to Chicago to shoot it.

Barry Bernardi was in Chicago with me and we were going through some of the pre-production. I get a call from David Wardlow, who was Heather’s agent and a good friend of mine. He said, “We’re setting up a conference call with Dick Bergerin [Executive Vice-President of MGM] in a half an hour, are you going to be available?” I said, “Yeah, what’s it about?” He said, “I can’t tell you.” Barry and I sat down in my apartment in Chicago and we gathered around the phone, and a half hour later it was Jay Kanter, Alan Ladd Jr., Richard Berger, Barry Bernardi, and myself all on the conference call. David announced to us that Heather had died that morning. Basically, Jay and Ladd just said, “Why don’t you just get on a plane and fly to Los Angeles and we’ll figure out what we are going to do.” I flew into LA and Barry and we went into Laddie’s office and we sat down and we said, “What are we going to do?” ‘Laddie’ said, “I don’t want to release a movie with a dead twelve year old in it.” Jay was in total agreement. Both of these guys are very much family oriented people. I said, “I don’t think I could even stand to sit in the cutting room and finish the movie and look at Heather every day.”

The day after the funeral we had a meeting at the studio. The decision was to not finish the film, which I was quite happy to do considering we had sixteen or seventeen pages to shoot. ‘Laddie’ and Jay said, “Go back to Chicago and do your television show and we’ll figure this out.” The board at MGM did not have the same feeling because they had a lot of money invested in the film. They owned the footage. Basically, that’s what transpired. We talked about it and we said, “Well, what do we do?” I don’t want somebody else taking all of my footage that I worked on for two years and doing something with it and that I would hate more than I am doing myself. I wrote a stupid new ending that’s on the movie, with Carol Anne on Tom Skerrit’s shoulder facing away from the camera. I just wrote this stupid tryst ending and shot it with a double and used a lot of outake footage to put stuff together. The film wasn’t running long enough for the delivery requirements, so we had to pad out the rest of the film. There are several sequences that wouldn’t have been in the film that are in the film because we needed to lengthen it. I am very proud of the FX in the film. I think the FX are really amazing. We did accomplish what we set out to do in terms of the FX, but unfortunately with what we had to do with the rest of the film, the story and the script don’t work as well together as they should have.

Jason Bene: There has been a lot of chatter on the internet about the ending of the film and was there an alternate ending.

Gary Sherman: [Laughs] There’s a lot of talk about it by a lot of people that I think need a life. It’s a movie. It’s what it is and this is not the ending that was supposed to be on the movie. Dick Smith and the people working with him did not have all of the FX ready in the time that we were given shooting the original film in Chicago. We couldn’t shoot the end in Chicago because we didn’t have enough of the proper crew. I was up to my eyeballs busy. It was unfortunate.

Jason Bene: Did you suffer a broken leg during the filming of the movie?

Gary Sherman: A broken foot. The problem was because we were shooting all of the FX live the sets were unbelievably complicated and there were cables everywhere. The camera operator had been hurt the day before playing baseball, so he had sprained his ankle or something. We were doing a very complicated dolly shot in a very confined area. It was one of the hallway shots. It was a very complicated camera move because it involved mirrors and the dolly was moving very quickly. I had to be on the dolly in order to make sure that what I needed was going to get shot. There was a whole bunch of us on the dolly. At one point the camera operator lost his balance and stepped down on his sprained ankle. He reeled back from the pain and threw his foot up and kicked me. I fell off the dolly, my foot ended up on the dolly track, and the camera which was moving at an unbelievable speed ran right over my foot and crushed three metatars.

I worked the rest of that day. I just put ice on it. I didn’t know what happened to it. I figurd it was okay. I basically was in shock and it was numb. I went to bed that night and the next morning I could not get out of bed. My driver said, “Where are you?” I said, “I can’t get out of bed.” So, he came upstairs and he helped me get dressed and he called into the stage and said, “I am taking Gary to the hospital.” He took me to the hospital and they x-rayed my foot. We lost a half a day while my foot was being wrapped. They wrapped my foot and put it in one of those canvas walking casts, but I couldn’t walk on it. They gave me a wheelchair, but I couldn’t get around the set in a wheelchair because of all of the cables. They had to carry me from set to set. I actually have some pictures of me sitting there in the wheelchair. After a few days I was on crutches and I was able to get around the set.

Jason Bene: I vividly recall watching Siskel & Ebert and they trashed Poltergeist III and they spent so much time blabbering about how many times Carol Anne’s name was used in the film. Her name was thrown around a number of times in all of the Poltergeist films. I don’t hear anyone complaining how many times Rob Zombie dropped the F-Bomb in Halloween II. The movie is centered around Carol Anne, so I didn’t see what the big deal was.

Gary Sherman: I don’t either. Poltergeist III was about Carol Anne. It wasn’t about anything except Carol Anne. The whole movie was moving towards the relationship between Carol Anne and Tangina, which was what the original ending was all about. It was about Tangina sacrificing herself for Carol Anne. That’s what the ending would have been. Gene as we know is gone and Roger unfortunately is having his physical problems at the moment. I feel awful for him because Roger’s an incredible person. Roger and I have never agreed on most things, except the fact that we actually like each other as human beings. Roger and I have had a running battle. Roger has written very personal stuff in some of his reviews of my films. He’s always felt that I was a much more talented director than the material that I chose to do. In fact, he come out and said that in the review for Wanted: Dead or Alive, he said, “Gary, when are you going to pick better material?” I don’t absolutely agree with him. The films I make I make for my audiences. I don’t make them for myself and I don’t make them for the critics. All of my films have been successful at the box office. Poltergeist III was probably the least successful of all of my films, and yet on DVD, it’s done extremely well. Here we are how many years later sitting here and talking about it.

Jason Bene: MGM didn’t do a lot to promote the movie. There is the trailer that came out, but it comes off as more of a teaser. They hardly showed any footage of the film. They must have been scared to put any footage of the film with Heather in it.

Gary Sherman: It was the board who wanted the picture released and the executives at the studio really didn’t want to release the movie. I didn’t want to release the movie and I didn’t want to do any publicity. Tom didn’t want to do anything. Nancy didnt want to do anything. Zelda absolutely, one hundred percent refused to do any publicity whatsoever. She just said, “Heather’s dead, I am not doing this.” She called me and said, “What do you think I should do?” I said, “I am not doing any publicity.” I was inundated by all of the tabloids. The papaparazzi were just everywhere. All that anybody wanted to talk about was Heather dying. I absolutely refused to discuss it until about 2000 when the E! Channel came to me and said they wanted to do a True Hollywood Story. I agreed to do it only if I had final cut. They did a very tasteful job on the whole thing. They did a three-hour special on the curse of Poltergeist. It was really well put together. They play it every year.

Killer Film can’t thank Gary Sherman enough for giving us a touching conversation about the making of Poltergeist III. This interview is dedicated to the memory of Heather O’Rourke and Zelda Rubinstein. You are both dearly missed.