And I realized that all those damn years I’d been shooting movies, with and without a camera.”Īt age 4, Hooper made his first with camera shot: XCU of a small bronze horse statue he now keeps on a shelf in his living room. I didn’t exactly know I did this until I was about 20: one evening outside San Francisco I was watching the Pacific Ocean from a Cliffside-suddenly the Panavision aperture in my head widened and went away. At the same time I was learning to talk, I was learning to see everything in camera coverage: wide shots, close-ups, etc. “I can remember my first 6mm lens-shot looking up out of the crib at the shadows dancing on the ceiling. Hooper wet-nursed on three, four movies a day, plus cartoons. ![]() The hotel was squared on all four sides by moviehouses (the Paramount, the State, the Queen, the Capitol) whose marquees changed every other day in the wartime Forties so there was a new movie to see every day. His father had a crackerbox-shaped limestone hotel on Congress, the main street, about four blocks from the Texas State Capitol building. Hooper spent his first two years in Austin. As soon as I was out of the hospital, I was taken with them to the movies. Probably it was one of those good, good black-and-white Michael Curtiz pictures she didn’t want to leave. My mother had to be taken out of the State Theatre in Austin straight to the hospital in labor. “I was a fanatic film fan from before birth. He’d go too far, then go farther, and go farther, and go farther again, and kick it again, and then it’s over, then get in an extra kick, then it’s over… then one more kick… ![]() Hooper was a scare-director who was methodically unsafe, who the audience (you) finally just couldn’t trust. Hooper was a new deal-simply this: no deal. Post-screening, blinking in the daylight leaning on our cars, Schrader and I tried to figure out what we’d run into.īrian De Palma and George Romero had only recently corkscrewed fresh blood into the horror genre ( Sisters, Night of the Living Dead) but they were sophisto guys who’d kept the “it’s-only-a-movie” deal with the audience. I flat couldn’t take it-neither could Paul Schrader, a curious friend who’d come along to the screening about midway through the movie we buzzed the projectionist to skip a couple of reels and just show us the end. I was newly exiled from Texas and had known Tobe Hooper as a good documentary filmmaker ( Peter, Paul, and Mary in Concert, 71) in Austin but had no way to be prepared for the bite of The Saw. I first squirmed through it back in 1975 in a tiny, dumpy screening room just below Sunset Boulevard. It may be the longest solid scream-track ever to shake out darkened American movie houses.” ![]() ![]() “It covers the infamous, excruciating Dinner Table Sequence (which was filmed nonstop for 36 hours straight until the last pennies of the $160,000 budget ran out). “This one line of dialogue goes on for about the last 23 minutes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (aka ’Saw 1), ”says Tobe Hooper, who directed it. “EEEWWoaoaoaaaaooooonnnnaaaaaeeeeyyyiiiiiiAAAAAAAYYYaaahhhhhhhhhhgggaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaa…” I’m always looking for a harder, nastier, crazier sling in the work.
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