“It’s Alive !” (1969)
Casa Mañana, Fort Worth’s landmark musical-drama playhouse, served a low-key backup function during the 1960s — as virtually a central casting-type agency for a low-rent movie producer who sought to make North Texas competitive with the corporate film industry in Los Angeles.
Larry Buchanan (1923-2004) succeeded chiefly at making homegrown motion pictures so odd as to defy belief — so politically neurotic as to make Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-riddled “JFK” (1990) look like documentary realism — and so frankly blunt as to obscure deficiencies in budgeting and logic. Buchanan had no tax-break incentives or major-studio underwriting, but he possessed gumption.
The fuller story on Buchanan, often treated with derision, has only gradually come to light. During the waning 1990s, the artist launched a second career as a film-festival personality, a genially defiant moving target.
Buchanan’s films belong more to the dream-state. A stilted intensity prevails. But Buchanan’s zest for life recalled the days when he had rehearsed for prominence by delivering fund-raising speeches for the orphans’ shelter he once called home.
The Buchanan films remain memorable in the manner of an illogically vivid dream. Some, like “High Yellow” (1965), are technically the equal of such acknowledged low-budget gems as Edgar G. Ulmer’s “Detour” (1945) and Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” (1962). Buchanan would topline his ensemble casts with capable, once-famous talent. His naïve political candor is sufficient to make Oliver Stone (whose films “The Doors” and “JFK” Buchanan had anticipated) seem middle of the road. And if Buchanan’s erratic pacing and home-movie scenic compositions play with less than propulsive force, he rallies with confidence.
His pictures have proved influential on directors of larger acclaim. It was in Buchanan’s “High Yellow” that a local actor, Bill Thurman, delivered the portrayal that helped to land him a key role in Peter Bogdanovich’s breakthrough film of 1971, “The Last Picture Show.”
“I don’t know that I bring any great command,” Buchanan told me in 1997, “but I love what I’m doing, and I believe that shows. We meant to defy formulas. We let our imaginations run as free as our budgets would allow.”
Buchanan has been hailed as an example of the “so-bad-it’s-good” class of motion pictures. In another sense, Buchanan enabled honest work for the once-prominent likes of John Agar and Disney alumnus Tommy Kirk, after Hollywood had given such talents the boot.
“Well, an assignment is an assignment when you’re raising a family,” he said. “But from time to time, I’d get free to do my more serious pictures.”
Origins of a Filmmaking Species
Recalled Buchanan: “My mother died when I was little. My father, a constable, arranged for his kids to be taken in by the Buckner Orphans’ Home in Dallas. With the theater at the orphanage, I was able to learn showmanship — my first relationship with the movie industry.” Dallas-based Interstate Circuit Theatres supplied Buckner with popular films.
“Around age 14, I’d go on the road, soliciting funds for Buckner. I was offered this scholarship to Baylor if I’d study for the ministry. But I said, ‘No, I’m heading west.’ The Interstate people gave me my intro to 20th Century-Fox.” Buchanan landed a small appearance in a war melodrama, “Wing and a Prayer” (1944). He became a regular at Fox: “One of the guys standing 70 feet away from Betty Grable.”
He recalled, “Then Fox tested me for the key role in “The Razor’s Edge” (1946). Tyrone Power was about to go overseas with the service. But then Power returned. The frustration made me quit Hollywood.” Buchanan retrenched in New York, where he developed a short instructional film, “The Cowboy.” He assisted Hollywood director George Cukor on “The Marrying Kind” (1952), onGreenwich Village locations. Jamieson Film Laboratory in Dallas offered Buchanan a directing hitch on TV commercials for such brands as Dr Pepper and Mrs. Baird’s Bread. The assignments fueled his feature-film ambitions.
“The stage scene — Casa Mañana in Fort Worth, especially — became my central casting surrogate,” said Buchanan, “a stock company of local talent. A slow breakthrough, sort of, was ‘The Naked Witch’ — filmed during 1957, down around the Hill Country, based on the old ‘Luckenbach Witch’ legend.”
Buchanan’s players from local stages and TV included Annabelle Weenick MacAdams, Libby Booth Hall, Bill Thurman, Patrick Cranshaw, Annalena Lund, George Edgley, and George Russell.
Buchanan said: “One picture of mine, “Free, White and 21,” anticipated the so-called ‘Blaxploitation’ [or Black exploitation] movie craze of the 1970s. Made back its $30,000 cost, and then some, in its first week.”
A prominent face in “Free White and 21,” Bill Thurman graduated to Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” (1971) and William Wiard’s “Tom Horn” (1980). Another stock player, Patrick Cranshaw of Buchanan’s “Mars Needs Women” (1966), wrapped up a long career at age 86 with roles in a new century’s “Air Bud” series and network television’s “Monk.”
Two Buchanan movies dealt with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Buchanan had launched “Naughty Dallas” as a 1950s project, finally completed for release in 1964. His dealings there with racketeer Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club established “Naughty Dallas” as a ragged precursor of John Mackenzie’s ambitious historical drama “Ruby” (1992). Buchanan also tackled a fictional speculation: “The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald” (1964).
Breakthroughs, after a Fashion
Then American International Pictures commissioned a series of TV-syndication scare-shows, based upon recycled scripts.
“American International wanted a hired gun — around $32,000 a picture.” Those include “The Eye Creatures,” a remake of Edward L. Cahn’s “Invasion of the Saucer-Men” (1957); “Zontar, the Thing from Venus,” starring big-studio has-been John Agar, a retread of Roger Corman’s “It Conquered the World” (1956); and “Curse of the Swamp Creature” (1966), resembling Cahn’s “Voodoo Woman” (1956). In “Mars Needs Women,” Disney cast-off Tommy Kirk plays a spaceman; the plot resembles an AIP musical, “Pajama Party” — also starring Kirk as a spaceman.
“It’s Alive” (1968), last of the AIP–TV movies, is a tour de force for supporting players Bill Thurman and Anne MacAdams, alias Annabelle Weenick. Thurman plays the deranged keeper of a prehistoric monster. MacAdams plays a woman enslaved by Thurman. Thurman also plays the rubber-suit monster.
“Anyhow, the AIP connection gave me the momentum to move back to Hollywood, in 1968–1969. Of course, I arranged to shoot around Texas whenever I could.”
“Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn” (1988) became Buchanan’s last completed release. Buchanan announced that year a plan to return to Texas for a sequel to “Mars Needs Women.” Nothing materialized.
Frustrations and struggles aside, Buchanan declared his career a success.
“Working the way I have, I’ve had fewer troubles — other than securing money. Y’see, once you walk through the big-studio gates, you become a corporate property, subject to what seems commercially viable.
“And once I’d learned that fact, I decided I’d make my pictures without ever traveling that route. And no, I’d not change a thing.”
