If Dan O’ Bannon directed Beverly Hills Cop it would look something like Mark Goldblatt’s directorial debut. Hardcore horror fans pushed aside the lighter side of cinema in the latter half of the 80′s, and in the wake of such arrogance pictures like Dead Heat were left out in the cold. I take movies for their face value, regardless of rating or how much slapstick is involved.

Jason Bene: Dead Heat merges three different genres into a hybrid cocktail and has a blast doing it.

Mark Goldblatt: I’m a horror buff and have been probably since I was in the womb, but I don’t know where it started. Knowing your website; I’m sure you are too. I grew up with Famous Monsters of Filmland and I saw the Universal Pictures when they first hit television. It was like a psychedelic change for all of the kids who were into that stuff. We were instantly into it and it was suddenly available to us. It was a cultural shift. I’ve always been into that so the opportunity to do something that had horror elements and action, which I love, was very appealing to me. I had been wanting to direct. The Terminator was my first big film and it gave me credibility as an editor. I had done some lower budget pictures with Roger Corman like Humanoids from the Deep, and I also worked with Joe Dante on Piranha and The Howling. Even then I was always attracted to doing horror pictures. Luckily I did ones that were successful. One thing lead to another and I became more bankable. After The Terminator I did Rambo: First Blood Part II, which was a huge hit. I had taken that picture over from another editor. That led to Joel Silver hiring me for Commando, to basically do the same thing, to take the picture over and make it work.

The idea of becoming a director was out there. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of producers and stuff like that. I was constantly having meetings and developing things. These things take years to terminate. Once the producers [David Helpern, Michael Meltzer] of Dead Heat decided that they wanted to go with me and the studio approved me, it was still a good amount of time in development and thinking about are we going to make this or not. In that time I had the good fortune to direct some second-unit for Paul Verhoeven on Robocop. That was amazing because it was directing. I had turned down all of the editing offers that I had gotten because I figured I had to be perceived as a director or else people would keep hiring me for editing and promising me directing and I would never get the opportunity. I kind of took myself off the market and one day I got this offer. Jon Davidson was a producer and he introduced me to Paul. That was amazing working along with Paul Verhoeven. I would get to mop up a scene. I was the basic shots like Robocop getting attacked in the parking lot. It was tough. Anyways, I was fortunate for the blessed trajectory.

Joe Dante was a great mentor for me on Dead Heat. He had wonderful suggestions [Vincent Price and Keye Luke were two of them] and in fact he agreed to be my filmic “godfather” on the film, assuring the studio that if I screwed up big time, he would step in and help to put things right. Happily, this never happened, but the promise to do so went a long way in getting the studio to feel more confident in hiring me.

Jason Bene: Was it difficult to balance all of the different genres in Terry Black’s script?

Mark Goldblatt: When I read it, it wasn’t. Joel Silver used to say, “Maybe a picture didn’t work because it’s a flying fish.” Meaning that it’s neither fish nor fowl. It’s some cross hybrid. Sometimes people have a very fixed genre expectation. I remember one of the executives saw it and was high on it and he said, “This could be the next Beverly Hills Cop.” I though, “Wait a second. This is about a cop who is disintegrating and turning into an organic mess. A stewed human. That’s not Beverly Hills Cop.” Some people have an issue with cross pollination. For some people it is difficult. The gore stuff is going to turn some people off. This is kinda like tongue-in-cheek. I think it is tongue-through-cheek. There are things breaking apart. Heads are falling off. Arms are falling off.

Jason Bene: The casting of Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo was great. Treat is more serious and you have a beefed up Joe who is the comic relief. How important was it to find two actors who have chemistry?

Mark Goldblatt: There’s a lot of reasons why it was important. The first reason was we needed an actor who was acceptable to the studio. Unless I got somebody that was on the short list they wouldn’t have made the picture at all. We went up to Joe Piscopo after some consideration because the studio was high on him. He was in a documentary that covered him behind-the-scenes and doing his schtick. I was very taken with the “normal” quote on quote persona, which is something that I hadn’t seen in any of the movies that had done because usually he did his schtick. I thought, “Well, this guy’s a crazy character, but he should be grounded in believability at a certain point.” I really liked that. We convinced him to do the picture. Once that happened, they were serious about making the picture. It was a whole dance in development. A movie can fall apart at any time. Really, until you start shooting, you never know. You never know what’s going to happen. From that we were able to get Treat. And from that we were able to get some of the other casting we did, which I thought was above the expectations that you might expect. Getting Vincent Price and Darren McGavin.

Jason Bene: I love Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and Darren’s role in A Christmas Story is legendary.

Mark Goldblatt: He was underestimated. A lot of his career was in television. I think in those days a lot of actors were just underestimated and were taken for granted because you saw them every week, but they were doing highly professional work. He played the first Mike Hammer. For genre freaks like us Kolchak was legendary. I always had this weird take on Kolchak and I said to him, “Kolchak always goes after the monsters and the creatures, but by the time his editor or the police show up there is no proof.  It’s like these creatures never existed yet all of these people are dead. The one way you could look at it is, he is killing everybody!” He didn’t like that. He said, “No! That’s not true!” I was just joking.

Jason Bene: Kolchak was such a great show. I cannot believe it only ran for one season.

Mark Goldblatt: The show was really good. The pilot and the second movie of the week they did are both great. [Producer] Dan Curtis was great.

Jason Bene: Vincent Price must have had some great stories. What was it like to work with the Master of the Macabre?

Mark Goldblatt: Amazing. Very wonderful to work with. On the first day we were doing the scene where Loudermilk is in bed and it is his last will and testament. I wanted everything to be perfect for Vincent and I was running around trying to get into the mood and the character. It was my first day of shooting on my first movie, so I’m nervous. He made me really relaxed, but I couldn’t sleep that I was so excited because I was directing Vincent Price on my first gig. I was so energetic running around getting a chair for him that by the end of the day I literally thought I was going to have a heart attack. I remember my feet were kind of spongy and I thought I was just going to pass out. What I learned from that is you have to be cool on the set. You don’t want to get too emotionally invested in running around and doing a lot of stuff. Just get into it and pace yourself. That’s probably the best advice for any director. He was great. Between setups and putting setups together I just talked to him. We shot part of the interiors in Culver City, California at Culver City Studios. I was telling him, “I always loved you in John Farrow’s His Kind of Woman.” He plays a hammy Shakespearean actor who teams up with Robert Mitchum to fight this bad guy played by Raymond Burr. It’s just a terrific performance. He said, “I always liked that too. We filmed it right on this stage.”

He was great. He used to wear red sneakers. He used to drive himself to the set everyday. He was pretty old. At one point we needed him for an extra night and we didn’t have any money because we maxed it out. He was willing to work for free. He enjoyed the part and the experience. It was a joy. By the way, he’s a living legend and somebody that I idolized. The first movie I ever saw him in was The Ten Commandments in 1956. I saw it the first week when I was eight. He made an impression in that movie. Then The Fly came out. Then the William Castle pictures House on Haunted Hill, which was another milestone in horror history. It was such an iconic performance in that picture. Then there were the pictures that followed like the Poe pictures. I remember fondly seeing The Pit and the Pendulum at its first Broadway engagement with my dad. He was somebody who meant a lot to me as a filmgoer.

Jason Bene: The 80′s were big on make-up effects and Steve Johnson was assigned the job of creating a plethora of gags. My favorite is the biker monster whose name is ‘The Thing’.

Mark Goldblatt: I wasn’t quite sure initially. It was a beautifully crafted mask. I really wanted it to be like a spitting image of Rondo Hatten. We didn’t do that. Steve had his ready. I was debating between that and the Rondo Hatten look. It actually looks great because it looks like an optical illusion because you have the two faces meshed and it throws you. I like that. Steve Johnson brought on Todd Masters. He concentrated on the butcher shop and the prosthetic and mechanical animals that come alive.

Jason Bene: The restaurant scene seemed complicated because there were a lot of effects going on at once. Was that hard to shoot from a coverage standpoint?

Mark Goldblatt: It was difficult in the sense that we had a very tight schedule, so as a result of that we had to shoot some of the stuff with a second-unit. I supervised the storyboarding and came on the set partially for additional shooting like I did for Paul on Robocop. That enabled us to have a lot of shots. You didn’t want to just do it in long takes or anything because it was all about the cutting. It worked. You have Joe Piscopo fighting off a pig. There are some cool zinger lines like,”That’s it, I’m a vegetarian.” I think Terry did a very good screenplay. The film was marketed as strictly an action picture. They didn’t even hint that is was a horror movie in this country. That’s already a kind of disconnect because action fans may not like horror pictures. I’m proud that Dead Heat has had a life after its initial release. When it opened it did not do all that well.

Jason Bene: At the time horror fans were indifferent to genre-bending horror comedies. Dead Heat is one of those movies that found its audience after the fact. Flicks are not as original now and nobody can argue that fact. Looking back at something that might have not been considered to be great is now elevated.

Mark Goldblatt: They absolutely get elevated. Some of them are actually quite good. What was the one they just redid? My Bloody Valentine. That’s actually a pretty good movie. I remember liking it when I saw it the first time. I didn’t realize they cut so much out of it. If you look at the director’s cut they put a little more of the visceral gore back in. It’s pretty good. I love Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I wasn’t a big fan of the slasher genre per se after it became a genre where people keep repeating and repeating and repeating. That’s to say there aren’t not some good slasher pictures. I’m a huge fan of the giallo film, which is basically slasher films but much more stylish. The truth of it is the giallo film predated the slasher film. Friday the 13th was basically derived from Bay of Blood. I remember when we were doing Halloween II that John Carpenter, although he didn’t direct that film, he studied Profondo Rosso [Deep Red]. There is a scene where this woman is basically having her face melted in a hot tub by ‘The Shape’. There is a similar scene in Deep Red. It’s a homage. This is amazing and here is our take.

Jason Bene: CG has its place but I am a fan of old school prosthetics. The scene where the woman’s face melts and it starts deteriorating must have been a pain to pull off, but it is real and it takes up time and space.

Mark Goldblatt: Basically, that was Steve Johnson and he devised a technique where he lets the thing happen in real time on camera, which we all love. As much as I love CG I think it is often overused. Today people make movies where everything is CG because it’s just simpler to shoot it if you don’t have to actually do it on the set. To tell you how it worked. The deterioration of the skin were it goes from tube skinned to wrinkled. The actress would be in the old age make-up then he would spray on a kind of a skin colored spray. What you would see on camera is the rotting flesh suddenly become smooth. We did it the other way around. Then you print it in reverse so basically the smooth becomes the rotting flesh. That’s just for skin tone. Then there would be prosthetic appliances on her face with someone pulling things off as her jowls fall off. It’s a combination of things. For a scene like that we rigorously storyboarded precisely what the angles were and what we would see in any given shot.

Jason Bene: The biggest action shot in the movie is where the ambulance goes flying down the hill and crashes into some cars. Was that as dangerous as it looked?

Mark Goldblatt: It was big and it was nighttime. We didn’t have a lot of money. We were near the hospital where the morgue scene was and it was pretty cool. Dan Bradley was our stunt coordinator and he was working on B-level pictures. He did one or two of the recent James Bond movies. He’s really hot. He’s huge now. He was really great back then, too. We were lucky to have him. We had some really good people. Robert D. Yeoman, our director of photography, has shot almost all of Wes Anderson’s movies. We had good people behind the scenes.

Jason Bene: Dead Heat is a fan favorite. A lot of my friends like the flick and they wanted to see a retrospective on it. It is nice to look back and reminisce and pay tribute to the cinema that paved the way for me.

Mark Goldblatt: I think so. Unfortunately for me the picture didn’t do so well and then my next film, The Punisher, went straight to video in this country and that effectively put a halt on my directing career. Luckily, I love editing and I got to do some really great movies.

Jason Bene: I can tell you that a lot of fans think your version of The Punisher is the strongest and the best of the three. The only thing missing was the skull. Was that a rights issue that kept if from being used?

Mark Goldblatt: [Laughs] No. It was just a mistake. We weren’t thinking of the big picture because obviously, in hindsight, that’s his trademark. You can change it or modify it, and they did do that in some of the other pictures and making it a little more modern. It was a logo that you identify with, so that was the mistake. We were going for a Mad Max thing. In fact, Norma Moriceau, who designed the costume, designed Mad Max’s costume. I have to take responsibility for that because I went along with it. I kept thinking about what he looked like in the comic, or at least what he looked like back in those days. It felt like he had a tight shirt that was body fitting. We wanted to get away from a spandex kind of look. I like what they did in the second Punisher where it was more of a t-shirt. Anyways, what we did was put the logo on his life, but that’s not the same. I cop to that. That’s too bad. What can you do?

Mark Goldblatt has been super busy the last few years working as an editor on such films as The Wolfman, Case 39, and G-Force. He just completed work on the prequel to Planet of the Apes called Rise of the Apes. The plot is an origin story set in present day San Francisco, where man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.

The Wolfman has been going through it’s shares of trouble, the main cause not only being reshoots but the topic of the initial release date. Now the Universal Pictures feature has run into another snag of sorts, if you look at it that way. Here’s more straight from Latino Review:

Even though they are bringing in two more editors, Universal is not being too paranoid are they? This could possibly be disaster in the making with the ongoing setbacks on this monster movie. Granted, the trailer spots and the images that we have seen so far are pretty top notch, it makes you wonder what exactly is wrong with this feature that’s got Universal going crazy with perfection now before the film’s hopefully inevitable February 12th release date.