An Evening with John Carpenter

As Halloween approaches, many of us will think of the 1978 film Halloween. Some of us even have the theme music going through our heads right now. That music is as iconic as the theme from Psycho, but Bernard Herman, not Alfred Hitchcock wrote Psycho’s theme. John Carpenter didn’t merely direct Halloween, he wrote the music, too. And he wrote the screenplay. This is a talented guy.

It was great fun to hear this talented but cranky man, John Carpenter, in person, at Joe Bob Briggs’ International Drive-In Jamboree at the West Wind Drive-In in Las Vegas. He’d been invited to talk about his filmmaking career. Last year, at the Fourth Annual Jamboree, the honored filmmaker was Roger Corman in his last interview.

Carpenter was introduced with a fun montage with scenes from Starman, Christine, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, They Live, Vampires, The Fog, and others mentioned throughout this post. His first, a student project made at USC that received a theatrical release, came out in 1974. And his last film, The Ward, was released in 2010. He is 76 years old and for the last decade and a half, he has concentrated on music.

The auteur theory, advocated first in the United States by critic Andrew Sarris in the 1960s, argues that a film’s director is the primary “author” of a film, even more than the screenwriter. Others have argued (even critic John Bloom, who plays the character of Joe Bob Briggs) that film is a collaborative art and no one can claim to be a film’s “author.” JB asked Carpenter about this, and he said he was a believer in the auteur theory – and a practitioner.

Carpenter made it clear through the night that he wanted to make the calls in a film. Certainly he didn’t want a studio executive to make decisions about a film. JB asked Carpenter whether he had an issue with authority. Carpenter said, “F*$% authority.”

Carpenter discussed skirmishes with authority through the years. His second feature, Assault on Precinct 13, was given an X rating by the MPA Rating Board for one scene. The film is based on the classic Western, Rio Bravo (Carpenter expressed his admiration for that film’s director, Howard Hawks). Early in the film, a little girl (played by Kim Richards, who some might remember from Escape to Witch Mountain and Nanny and the Professor) is graphically murdered. That one scene earned the film a rating that could be box office poison.

An assistant from Universal Studios gave Carpenter some advice. He told him to make the cut, take out the killing. In one print, which would be sent to the ratings board. But the cut wouldn’t be made in any of the prints that would go out to theaters. They rightly guessed that no one on the ratings board would venture out to see the film in a theater.

JB asked Carpenter about his political views, and he admitted to being liberal but said he didn’t want to talk about that because, “I’m sure there are people here with different views.” This rare display of political civility was on display again later in the conversation.

JB asked about the director’s working relationship with Kurt Russell. Russell starred in Carpenter’s made-for-TV biography, Elvis. They also worked together on the apocalyptic sci-fi thriller, Escape from New York, and its sequel, Escape from L.A., as well as two other beloved cult films, The Thing (a remake of the Howard-Hawks-produced The Thing from Another World) and the genre-mashing Big Trouble in Little China.

The night of the event, they screened The Thing at the drive-in. It was a bomb when it came out. Maybe people weren’t ready for such a nasty alien in the summer of E.T. It debuted on June 25th, 1982, the same day another sci-fi film debuted and floundered at the box office. Some people went to the drive-in that night for a double feature of The Thing and Blade Runner.

JB admitted that he wanted to screen Big Trouble in Little China, but the distributor was asking for too much money.

JB asked Carpenter if he had any problems working with Kurt Russell, “a big-time Republican.” Carpenter joked that Russell was to the “right of Attila the Hun.” (I’ve heard that comparison before, but I had no idea that Attila was pro-life.) Carpenter said he enjoyed working with Russell who was a true professional, prepared and hardworking –they just didn’t talk politics.

The other film of the night’s double feature was Prince of Darkness, another film that Carpenter wrote, directed, and scored. This film is part of Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy,” which includes The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness (not screened that night).

Prince of Darkness has abysmal theology. It theorizes that the Catholic Church has, for centuries, had “Satan” imprisoned in the hope that science would eventually come up with a way to defeat him. (And that Jesus may have been a space alien.) But it also has Alice Cooper as a zombie master, so it might all balance out.

These films do not have happy endings. JB asked Carpenter if he thought of himself as a pessimist. He said he was “a short term pessimist but a long term optimist. I want humanity to survive.”

There is no doubt the man is a curmudgeon, but John Carpenter has made some great films. Perhaps in the comments you could mention your favorite Carpenter film and tell us why we should watch it.