Going to Pieces by Adam Rockoff

Author:Adam Rockoff [Rockoff, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2012-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

After Maniac had completed principal photography, Lustig needed a few pickups of Spinell. Spinell, however, was already well into production on Nighthawks (1981), a police thriller starring Sylvester Stallone and Rutger Hauer, and no longer looked the part of Frank Zito. He was clean-shaven and his hair was cut. Since he had been friends with Stallone for a long time, since their days on Farewell My Lovely (1975) and Rocky (1976), the Nighthawks makeup department fitted him with wig and mustache which allowed him to return to the role of Zito. But this wasn’t the only production which helped out Maniac. The film was mixed in the same facility as Dawn of the Dead. For the shotgun scene, Lustig couldn’t seem to get the sound of the blast right, so he lifted the effect from a scene early in Romero’s film when a cop comes barging through a door and shoots a zombie.

During production, Spinell was the one who had the highest expectations for the film. Lustig kept telling him, “Joe, let’s just make sure we can play on 42nd Street and Texas drive-ins,” but Spinell kept saying, “Bill, you don’t know what we’re making, it’s a happening. It’s really going to be an amazing movie. You don’t know how good this movie is turning out.” Lustig had the normal insecurities of any young director and at one point, soon after the movie was finished, he even suggested they should have made it more violent. “I turned to Andy Garroni and said, ‘We didn’t put enough blood and gore in the movie.’ I don’t know why I would think that, but I really did. I honestly thought we should shoot some more blood and gore and put it in the movie.”

According to Lustig, the moment at which Maniac came alive was when it was scored by Jay Chattaway, whom he calls a genius. At the Cannes Film Festival, the film’s sales agent Irving Shapiro booked the film in a small theater for a midnight showing. The cinema sold out immediately and the producers had to turn people away. By the end of the festival, the producers had made deals which were worth at least a million dollars; the entire film was paid off and in profit without having even opened yet. Maniac looked and sounded so good, in fact, that Analysis Releasing, the distributor that Lustig finally settled on, had no idea it was shot on 16mm. Lustig can’t say enough about the marketing savvy of Analysis, which was in the process of distributing the equally problematic Caligula (1980):

The advertising created by the U.S. distributor was in your face. It was undeniably perverse. I sat at meetings with these two lunatics at Analysis Films, and I say that with affection because I think both those guys are amazing, Paul Cohen and Bob Kaplan. And these guys would be telling me, honest, to add more shadow in the crotch so it looks like he [the figure on the film’s one-sheet] has a hard-on.

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