Beware, Disco Sally!
Washington Post, The (DC) - February 8, 1979
Author: Blaine Harden
The 81-year-old widowed grandmother, the one with mischievous eyes and bleached blue jeans, wheeled around the skating rink, moving smooth, but moving slow. Her ankle hurt. She'd twisted it giving a karate kick to her roommate, and she was taking life easy.
Regina Long, who has two sons, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, skated to the side of the cavernous Alexandria Roller Rink, shook her hips perfunctorily to an organ version of "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and fell down. She was giggling before she hit the hard wood.
After the fall and during the giggle, a tall, bald and fast-skating man rolled by. He said his name was Duncan, that he was an artist and that Long was "surreal." Later, in an interview, he said she was "supreme."
"Yes, the ankle hurts," Long said, after friends pulled her to her feet. It didn't hurt badly enough, however, to keep her from skating until the rink closed and then going disco dancing until 3 a.m. at The Fraternity House in Georgetown.
Regina Long was born in 1897 on F Street SW, in the District and there she gave birth to her sons. Her husband Herbert Long, a mechanic who ran an auto repair shop on Pennsylvania Avenue SE, told her that a wife's place is in the home. And until he died in 1956, home is where Regina Long stayed.
"He worked and he came home and we had a good life. I didn't dance much then," Long said.
Regina Long moved to an efficiency apartment after the funeral. Her granddaughter Kathy was a teen-ager then and Long started to go around with Kathy's crowd on Saturday nights. "As soon as I walked into their parties," Long said, "they would all scream: 'Have no fear, Kathy's grandmother is here.'"
But Kathy grew up, got married, had two children and, to Long's way of thinking, became a trifle dull. The great-grandmother moved on, leaving slumber parties and pillow fights for disco lights and an occasional bloody mary.
Long now lives in an Arlington apartment, supporting herself on Social Security and her husband's military pension. Every Wednesday night she roller skates. She disco dances five nights a week in Georgetown. Last Halloween , dressed as Shirley Temple, carrying a giant yellow lollipop and shooting a water pistol, she won a disco trophy for the "most outrageous" costume.
"She's a lovely mother, but she's not a typical mother," said her son Herbert Long Jr., a jet engine mechanic at Andrews Air Force Base. He and his family live what he calls "the quiet life" in Upper Marlboro, and Regina Long visits them often.
"She has a good time, but she doesn't seem to stay very long. She doesn't like to just sit and talk," her son said.
"I've seen that rocking chair and that rocking chair is not going to get me," Long said, explaining why, after a quiet life as a mother and wife, she turned into someone her grandchildren call "disco granny."
"I stayed home and I took care of my family. Nowadays, mothers don't stay home. That's why there is so much crime and delinquency. Now that my children are all grown up, I can act crazy and dress crazy all the time.
"When I get in that rocking chair that will be the end of me," Long said.
The race to outrun the rocking chair has included a 1977 Christmas tour of Georgetown nightclubs with Long wearing 140 blinking lights. "I had three extension cords and lights from my head to my toes. They plugged me in after I walked in the door," Long said.
She's learning karate from her grandchildren, she discoed last September with a broken toe and she claims to have ridden a horse near Houston, Texas, with a plaster cast on her broken leg.
Broken bones, while a nagging problem for Long, have not slowed her down or adversely affected her health, according to Dr. Herbert Metx, an Arlington podiatrist who treated her.
"Her feet are very young feet," Metz said. "Her pulse is good coming down to her lower extremities. That is very good at the age of 81. She is quite a girl."
In Georgetown, at The Fraternity House and Cy's, managers say Long is pampered and loved. "She gets more attention than everybody in the place put together," said Glen Thompson at The Fraternity House. Her picure hangs near the pool table at Cy's.
"When you are down in the dumps," said Joe Toussaint, 32, one of her disco friends, "she goes out of her way to make sure you have a good time. When you call her up and ask her to go dancing, the first thing on her mind is what she can wear to make you laugh."
Long is planning this month to head north to New York City to dance at the Studio 54 discotheque. She's heard of an elderly woman called Disco Sally, who's grabbed headlines with her wild dancing there.
"I'm going up there to challenge Disco Sally," Long said.
Reached in New York last week, Disco Sally, 78, said she will be in Hollywood for the next three months making a movie about her life called "Disco Sally." But she said she'd be willing to challenge Reginal Long when she comes back to New York.
Disco Sally is planning to marry her 26-year-old manager, John Touzous, in the near future. Regina Long says she will marry no one because she doesn't want to be tied down.
O’HERLIHY PROUD OF ’HALLOWEEN’ ROLE by Vernon Scott
Image from FLIXSTER O’HERLIHY PROUD OF ’HALLOWEEN’ ROLE
Miami Herald, The (FL) - July 5, 1982
Author: VERNON SCOTT United Press International
Dan O’Herlihy, a native of the auld sod, has appeared in scores of American movies and TV shows but never as an Irishman until now, playing arch-villain in Halloween III.
If it seems a comedown for a distinguished graduate of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre to be playing a menace in a Hollywood horror film, O’Herlihy is quick to disabuse the notion.
"This is the most interesting character and the first Irishman I’ve ever played in Hollywood," said the proud Hibernian.
"As a matter of fact, I’ve played nothing but Americans in this country going back more years than I care to count. I’ve even portrayed Mark Twain and Franklin Roosevelt. But never an Irishman."
As Conall Cochran, O’Herlihy plays one of the most fiendish villains in film history. Although his motivation may be
obscure, Cochran’s scheme is to kill off all the children in the United States.
Cochran, the sole owner and proprietor of a Halloween mask manufacturing company, has a micro-chip built into each mask, which, when activated by a TV signal, will kill anyone wearing the mask.
Cochran, of course, sees to it that on Halloween all 84 million American kids are wearing his masks. Then, during a TV commercial, the proper button is pushed and pffft, there goes the younger generation.
As is usually the case with horror films, fate steps between the maddened heavy and his would-be victims and the audience leaves the theater safe in the knowledge that they have been scared half to death.
"It’s delicious," O’Herlihy said with relish. "Cochran is a man who simply doesn’t like children. I’m the father of five and the grandfather of four, so Cochran is a man with whom I can identify."
O’Herlihy, who has starred in such stark dramas as Fail Safe, Home Before Dark and Imitation of Life, is convinced audiences prefer such other of his films as The Highwayman, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Black Shield of Falworth.
The success of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and horror films have convinced O’Herlihy that science fiction and fantasy are the order of the day for moviegoers.
"They are all played for reality, just as Halloween III is, but they are tales that can only be told in the motion-picture medium," he said. "They don’t work well in books, TV shows, on stage or in radio.
"It’s all fantasy and that’s as it should be. I’m all for it. People are staying away from hard-edged movie dramas.
"Horror and fantasy provide escape from the grinding reality of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, which drag audiences down to glory in neuroses.
"Escapism should be the central core of movies," he said. "I get bored with realistic films, even when they are well done. They are too predictible. Even good historical films are a form of escapism because they get away from today’s stresses and problems."
O’Herlihy’s most recent brush with fantasy was last year’s BBC classic gothic horror TV movie "Artemis" in which he played a Dutch organist chosen by the gods to disseminate death throughout the world by striking a certain chord in a 1,000- year-old cathedral.
"He was almost as fascinating as Cochran," O’Herlihy said. "Anyone he touched died immediately. It was a truly satanic story.
"It’s much more fun playing heavies than straight roles, especially when you can bring so much sincerity to a part. I played heavies in The Tamarind Seed, The Night Fighter and Home Before Dark, which my agent thought would ruin my career.
"Strange as it may seem, I’ve got my best reviews playing villains. But of the heavies I’ve played, Cochran in Halloween III may be the most villainous of the lot."
PRINE TIME - ACTOR HAS MANY ROLES, MANY FANS TO MATCH by John Wooley
Prine Tine - Actor Has Many Roles, Many Fans to Match
Tulsa World - December 6, 1996
Author: John Wooley
The Rocky Autograph Picture Show, with scheduled celebrities Andrew Prine, Brinke Stevens, Melissa Anne Moore, Maureen Flaherty and Karl Lauer
When Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where Holiday Inn, 1010 N. Garnett Road
Admission $4, with children admitted free when accompanied by an adult
In addition to -- and thanks to -- an acting career that spans more than three decades, Andrew Prine has been appearing at some movie and TV conventions recently, chatting with fans, answering questions and signing photos.
What kinds of photos does he sign? It depends on which fans he's around.
"If it's a western show, it'll be (a photo from) some old thing I did with John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, something of that nature," said Prine in a recent telephone interview from his Southern California home. "I've done `Star Trek' and `Deep Space Nine,' so I do a lot of the `Star Trek' conventions, and those are fun. But mostly what people recognize me for these days is the series `V' (which originally aired in 1984-85); I played Stephen, the head of the alien Gestapo. It's having a second life on the Sci-Fi Channel, and I'm finding that it's very popular -- photos from `V' are the things I sign the most.'
He said he'd have `a little bit of everything,' photo-wise, at Sunday's autograph show, and `a little bit of everything' makes for a pretty good description of Prine's career. One of America's busiest character actors since the mid-'60s, the Florida native broke into the business in a rather spectacular way -- his first real credit was the lead role in Broadway's "Look Homeward, Angel," based on the autobiographical Thomas Wolfe novel.
"I was very, very lucky," he said. "I was just too right for the part. I was this tall, skinny, Southern kid -- who was Thomas Wolfe. They couldn't deny me.
"So, literally, for two years on Broadway I learned to act. Every night, the stage manager came back and gave me copious notes -- I mean, I had to go through that every night. But it taught me how to do the deed. I didn't know (anything). I was just good; that's not nearly enough to sustain a show.
"But that's how young actors are," he added. "Young actors are not necessarily talented in the sense that they can do a wonderful thing with finesse. What they have that we don't have later is the heat. It's the heat that gets you there. It's the desire. You've got to want it worse than somebody else, or you'll go do something else."
After his run in "Look Homeward, Angel," Prine moved to the West Coast, where a job in a new TV series was waiting for him. In the NBC-TV series "Wide Country," he played the younger brother of rodeo drifter Earl Holliman. From there, he went into movies, often playing the same kind of character.
"There were so many westerns then," he recalled, "and I was right for them."
Prine's western films of the '60s and early '70s include such well-remembered pictures as "Chisum" with John Wayne, "Bandolero" with James Stewart, "Texas Across the River" with Dean Martin and "Advance to the Rear" with Glenn Ford and Stella Stevens. But in the late '60s, he was offered the lead in a horror movie called "Simon, King of the Witches." He accepted, and the westerns gave way to horror.
"I could get the lead in horror films," he said. "I couldn't get the lead in straight movies because they would be the grownup guys, usually, unless you were lucky enough to be Bob Redford or Warren Beatty. I was the kid, you know. But they said, `Look, you can have the lead, you can have anything you want, if you'll do this damn movie.'" He laughed. "That was `Simon.'"
The movie made a lot of money for everyone involved, and Prine's work in the lead part got him typed as a bankable horror actor. Over the next few years, he made a number of other fright films, including "Crypt of the Living Dead," "The Evil," "Grizzly," "The Town That Dreaded Sundown ," and an infamous little picture called "Barn of the Naked Dead." It's the first picture that famed director Alan Rudolph ("Welcome to L.A.," "The Moderns") ever did, although Rudolph doesn't exactly advertise that fact.
Prine isn't very proud of the film, either.
"That's the only movie I ever regretted making," he said with a rueful chuckle. "It was just too awful. We had no director, and I took over the first day and ran it until they brought in Alan, who was a young apprentice director, and he got it finished.
"I was seduced into doing it by greed. They paid me an awful lot of money. They paid me the whole budget to do it. And I talked myself into believing I could do something with it." He laughed again. "Now, it haunts me wherever I go."
Prine has continued to guest-star in television series, and to score large parts in small films. One of his most unusual roles came a couple of years ago, when he played a Japanese-American gangster named Kyoshi Jones in a picture called "Chill Factor."
"Half my role was in Japanese, and I would go talk to my cartel, which was all of these older, dignified Japanese fellows they'd hired," he recalled. "On the first take, they didn't known anything. They didn't know the script. I had my dialogue on an idiot board, written phonetically, and I came in and said it. And at the end of the take, these poor Japanese men looked at each other like `What the hell was that? Was he
talking to us?' It certainly sounded nothing like
anything they'd ever heard."
Prine laughed. "Someone surely dubbed me when the picture went to Japan. They used my own voice in the American version, because Americans don't know. but the Japanese people -- they'd know."
THE 'PROFESSOR' WHO MAKES HORROR MOVIES by Glenn Lovell
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - January 21, 1985
Author: Glenn Lovell, Knight-Ridder News Service
It never fails. When people meet Wesley Earl Craven of Cleveland, they comment on his "professorial" demeanor, his gentle, reassuring manner of speech and his conservative tweeds and button-down collar style of dress.
Obviously Craven teaches Latin or the humanities at some posh prep school, right?
Hardly. Wes Craven, as he's known in film circles, makes horror movies.
No, not your run-of-the-mill stalk-and-slash fare. Craven's goose-bump specials - Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, among them - aren't as easily shrugged off. They tap into our primal fears of being hounded by backwater cretins, cackling bogymen, religious zealots - even Satan himself.
Craven's grim, single-minded shockers are the stuff of which recurring nightmares are made. At their most creepily effective, they play with and often blur the lines between troubled sleep and disturbing reality. Brian De Palma (Carrie) and Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) have worked similar effects, but Craven got there first.
It makes sense, then, that Craven's latest, the $3 million A Nightmare on Elm Street, is the most ambitious romp through the slumbering subconscious yet. It's all about three teenagers who are pursued through their sleep by a ghoulish, fire-scarred handyman named Fred Krueger.
According to a spokesman for New Line Cinema, the film's distributor, Nightmare has made more than $8 million since its first regional release Nov. 9, an excellent take for an independent movie. The film opened in Philadelphia on Friday.
Craven, speaking from the roof of his Santa Monica, Calif., home (through the miracle of a cordless phone), calls his latest "sort of a horror fantasy - not the typical slash-and-splatter thing." To those who persist in lumping it with the Friday the 13th bloodbaths, he replies, "Mine is more psychological. It also has to do with generation conflict (between Ronee
Blakley's stuporous mother and Heather Langenkamp's frightened yet resourceful daughter).
"As a lot of my films do, Nightmare uses the cliches of the genre, but in the end they're somehow turned on their head. I think it has a lot to do with my different philosophical approach to the genre."
In Craven's case, a unique worldview is at work, a philosophy born of a still-vivid fundamentalist Baptist upbringing and a strong, formal training in the classics.
If the 45-year-old Craven (educated at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Wheaton College in Illinois, Billy Graham's alma mater) looks professorial, it's probably because he taught humanities at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, N.Y.
It was while at Clarkson that Craven oversaw a $3,000 student film titled The Investigators. Described as a "takeoff on Mission: Impossible," the film was shown to students and townspeople and realized a profit of $4,000. "We pasted it together with glue," laughs Craven. "But that was it - I caught the fever. I was 29 and had a wife and two kids, but I dropped everything and
went to New York. It had a devastating effect on my life."
When Craven gave himself over to full-time moviemaking, he was dumping a lot more than a teaching job: He was turning his back on his strict religious training.
PURGING HIS RAGE
"I came out of a very religious background," he recalls with difficulty. ''As fundamentalist Baptists, we were sequestered from the rest of the world. You couldn't dance or drink or go to the movies. The first time I paid to see a movie (To Kill a Mockingbird) I was a senior in college. . . . My whole youth was based on suppression of emotion. As they say in psychological circles, my family never got in touch with their rage. So making movies - these awful horror movies, no less - was, I guess, my way of purging this rage."
Though he might have seemed bit old to be rebelling, that's exactly what Craven did in New York in the late '60s. He grew his hair to his waist, divorced his Baptist wife and did postproduction chores on Time-Life documentaries and 8mm porno loops. During that period, he met kindred spirit Sean S. Cunningham, who would direct 1980's Friday the 13th.
"We got offered a job by Hallmark Releasing Co. They wanted to have a real slam-bang horror film. They offered us $50,000. John said we could make it for $40,000 and split the rest. They liked our ideas and ended up giving us $90,000. We made Last House on the Left."
Shot in grainy 16mm and released in 1972, Last House has earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 million. Craven's inspiration for this tale of kidnapping and torture? Would you believe Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring? ''I very consciously used the same medieval morality tale about a father taking revenge on the shepherds who raped his daughter. It was sort of a modernization of the story."
GOING AFTER 'A GRABBER'
Beyond this, Craven and Cunningham (who produced) wanted to make "a grabber . . . a film that showed things that had never been shown on screen before. In a sense to show violence as it really was, rather than in a
cinematic way. We just forged into a whole new area where people had not gone before, because of taste or fear of not getting the right rating."
Craven achieved his grim goal with a vengeance. Last House freaked out the public and the critics (who called it "vile" and "pornographic"). The film also further estranged Craven's family in Ohio. ("My brother said, 'I can't imagine where you got those thoughts.' ") And though he sought to move into adventure and satire, Craven was immediately typed as a low-budget horror filmmaker, a label that still makes him wince.
Worse, Craven wasn't allowed entry into what he calls "the club." Members in good standing include John Carpenter (Halloween), De Palma, Bob Clark (Black Christmas) and even his old buddy Cunningham. These are the
filmmakers who have made the jump from low-budget gore to big-budget prestige pictures.
"I felt I had made my mind-blower, and it was time to move on. But for a period of 2 1/2 years I couldn't get financing for anything. How could we have made a hit film for 10 cents and not have somebody knocking on our door, saying, 'Here's a million dollars'?"
Craven figures he picked up $100,000 in residuals on Last House. When that was gone, a friend advised, "You have to make another Last House." Craven replied, "I can't. People turn away from me when they find out I made that movie." The friend persisted. "Get rid of that Protestant guilt. Don't be ashamed of what you do well."
So Craven made The Hills Have Eyes (1977), a compact little horror tale about an inbred family of Mojave Desert cannibals. Typically, filmdom's professor of gore came up with the plot at the New York Public Library while thumbing through "The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mayhem." A gruesome 17th- century account caught Craven's eye. It had something to do with a Scottish clan that preyed on and pickled unlucky wayfarers.
Between Hills and Elm Street there have been three TV movies (including Stranger in Our House with Linda Blair), three scripts "in development" that
went nowhere, and a couple of films, Deadly Blessing (1981) and Swamp Thing (1982).
Deadly Blessing, starring Ernest Borgnine, allowed Craven to share firsthand fears of religious fanaticism; Swamp Thing, about a reptilian super hero, was his chance to "do something gentle and fun-loving and positive."
Yes, Elm Street - with its stalking specter and screaming teeny-boppers - is a return to conventional fright, Craven acknowledges. "But this time I really let my imagination run free. Maybe this will be the one that gets me into 'the club.' I'm tired of being out in the cold. I certainly don't want to do another slasher or man-with-a-knife type of film. I'm talking to some people now about an island castaway movie - a Lord of the Flies with girls. I know in my heart I'm ready for something new. I'm tired of being 'the granddaddy of the slasher film.' "
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