I have known filmmaker Eric Miller for a while. I absolutely loved the no-budget determination of his early projects.
I have known filmmaker Eric Miller for a while. I absolutely loved the no-budget determination of his early projects. My favorite of the bunch, Mark Of The Damned, with its creative storyline and Ray Harryhausen-inspired stop motion effects, brought something unique to the Richmond film pantheon. So I have kept Miller on my radar, and was happy to hear that his newest project, Midnight Frights, had been renewed for a second season on PBS. Midnight Frights, which airs the last Saturday of every month on WCVE channel 23, is a throwback to the midnight movie days, with a shady/funny host introducing terrible movies. For anyone up late and looking for a bit of munchie-time entertainment, this is it.
I had a chance to sit down with Miller and his main writer, Will Towles, to talk with them about how the show came together and where it is going.
How did you come up with the idea of going to PBS?
Eric: A friend of ours, Sean Kotz, produced two documentaries about midnight movie hosts [in Virginia], and the local PBS station aired both of the movies.
Will: Virginia Creepers and [one about the] Bowman Body*
photo by Eric Williams
Eric: Hi There, Horror Movie Fans. I’m in those documentaries, and our host Armistead Spottswoode is in those documentaries. I also made a movie called Mark of the Damned that the local PBS [channel] showed on Halloween two years in a row, and a couple times in the summertime. Two Easters ago, Armistead and I worked at the character department at Maymont. A woman got on the carriage and said she recognized [Armistead and I] from Hi There, Horror Movie Fans. She said, “Your movie is on my desk.” I’m like, “Well that’s great; what do you do?” She’s like, “I’m the programming director at PBS.” So that was pretty exciting. I hadn’t met anybody over there yet, and I wanted to thank them for showing my stuff. So on the ride, I asked her, “Do you think there is an audience for a midnight movie show now?” And she said she thought so, absolutely. So we had a couple meetings. About six months later we gave them our pilot episode, and they took it. Now we just finished our pilot season. That’s how we got started; it was an accident. Just a coincidence.
So you’re in season 2 now? So now they’re finally helping you a little bit.
Eric: Well, I gotta say, they helped us from the get-go by putting our stuff on T.V. It’s a volunteer production and they’re helping us out a little bit, so it doesn’t cost us any money to produce the show. The show produces itself now.
Will wasn’t a writer on Mark of the Damned, was he?
Will: No, I met [Eric] because of it. I saw Mark of the Damned and realized that I had to start talking to this guy. I was way into Mark of the Damned. I’ll say one thing about PBS–they lost their funding just as we started. The night before we started shooting the pilot, there was the debate between Obama and Mitt Romney and that was the night that [Romney] mentioned firing Big Bird. PBS was in the sights of government already, and a couple months later, the total funding for PBS just went to zero. So we knew they weren’t gonna give us money going in, and we were pretty positive they weren’t gonna give us money after we started. They were as supportive as they could be. But after the year, they kicked in with a stipend, and then they really started selling the show.
Eric: They were very happy to know that we wanted to do a second season. They were concerned that we were gonna be kind of hard about it. You know, like, “We haven’t gotten anything for all of our hard work.” Armistead really loves making the show, and I like making the show. So long as Armistead is still into it, I’ll be into it.
Will: Yeah, he’s the star. As long as he’s up for doing it, I think we’ll keep on doing it.
Eric: And the Byrd Theatre–we shoot at the Byrd Theatre.
Will: Yeah, thats the other star of the show.
Eric: [laughs] Everybody there has been really really helpful. We’ve had a bunch of people from the [Byrd] in the show. We’re hoping to get the manager on this month.
What was the basis for the show’s concept? There have been plenty of midnight horror movie shows–Elvira comes to mind…
Will: We wanted to do something where the host is lying the whole time. A lot of midnight movie shows want to tell you about the movie, and kinda explain what’s going on and give you some backstory. Since everyone’s got Google now, and IMDB, and special features on DVD, you can get all that information. We just thought it’d be funny if the host was lying about the movie.
Eric: He believes everything he says. He’s like that uncle that just tells you stories and you love his stories. You know they’re not true, and it doesn’t matter because you just like the guy. That’s the premise with our host. Armistead grew up in Richmond, he grew up watching the Bowman Body, and after I had the first meeting with PBS, I [said to] Armistead, “I think i’m making a T.V. show–would you like to be the host?” And he goes, “100 percent.” I think it’s something he’d been waiting for.
Will: Yeah, he’s almost been famous. It’s like he’s [been] about a millimeter away from fame with a lot of the rock bands [he’s been in, but] he’s not bitter about it. It suits him to be on TV.
Eric: If the show goes big he’ll be able to handle it. He’s a great guy, terrific guy to work with.
Will: The idea that we’re not giving anybody any concrete facts–the movie [being shown] is the straight man, and we’re making fun of ourselves and giving a lot of respect to the actual film, where [something] like Mystery Science Theater 3000 is doing the opposite. We just wanted to do the opposite of what people expect.
Eric: Yeah, we like these movies. [Laughs]
You need to get public domain movies–has it been hard finding the right moves to put on there?
Will: No.
Eric: It’s not been hard, but we’re only on our second season. We have a good friend, Mr. Lobo, who has a television show called Cinema Insomnia, and he’s had to change up his show a lot over the years, because he started running out of public domain movies. We’ll deal with that when we get there. Right now, since we only produce one show a month, we won’t run out for a while.
Will: We’ll probably show Mark of the Damned eventually, and we have some other friends that have movies, so we might see if we can just get an agreement to show those movies. I think eventually if we run into that, we may start making our own content. We wanna do some tie-ins with some people, like one of the guys who just started working, Jim Stramel. Jim Stramel came on in February, and he shot a pilot for a t.v. series called Revival that we’ll probably tie in somehow.
Sounds like the show is giving a platform to a bunch of people in town.
Will: I started doing stand up comedy this summer, so I’m trying to bring stand up comedians on the show when we’ve got a second. Now that we’ve gotten better at shooting and we know we won’t waste people’s time, we’re trying to bring in a little bit more outside talent. For the first year, it was like, “Can we do this?”
Eric: Shawn Hambright was writing [and acting] for the show for a long time. He’s with the Richmond Comedy Coalition.
Will: I really really wanna get some people from the Comedy Coalition.
Eric: Well, we had like three. Joey [Tran] and Shawn…
Will: And Blu! [Josh Blubaugh]
Eric: Blu is terrific, he was in our September episode. We shot on location for one of them–we went to Bacon’s castle out in Surry County. On location at a 16th century castle.
Will: The original selling point with PBS was that the show was going to be like Masterpiece Theatre. So we tried that, and the show is coming back to that. We got a Poe reenactor, so now we have Edgar Allan Poe running around.
Eric: Our actor, Charles, is terrific. He does Poe as a character, and he does a bunch of others. The Poe Museum is now one of our sponsors, so we try to promote the Poe Museum and Poe things, but our show is so weird and our schedule is so awful that instead of being able to go the Poe Museum last month like we wanted to, we ended up just having a bunch a bunch of jokes about Poe on the show. But we had a really good actor playing Poe, so at least we made it classy, and it looked really good.
Will: They were really cool too, cause we came in there completely honest about how spoofy we were gonna be about it, expecting them to just tell us to leave. One of the takeaways from this is it never hurts to ask, especially in this town. One, people are probably okay with you doing whatever you want, as long as you’re gonna be respectful. And two, you probably know the person already.
Eric: And when you say you’re connected with PBS, people are really excited about helping out. I don’t think we would’ve been able to go to Bacon’s Castle if we weren’t with PBS. It would’ve just been too expensive. And they just want promotion. Once they realize the person they are talking to is broke, but they do stuff for the greater good, they don’t worry about money anymore. They’re just like “How can we help?”
——
The Bowman Body hosted Shock Theatre from 1970-1976 in the Richmond – Petersburg market on Friday and Saturday nights, and was so popular his program beat out Johnny Carson in the time slot! Later, Bill went on to host Cobweb Theater in Charlottesville (1977-1979) and Monsterpiece Theatre in Fairfax, VA (1982-1987).
