This past Halloween morning (2008), I had a chance to interview film star Randal Malone by telephone about his latest (and very possibly greatest) movie project, FRANKENSTEIN RISING. JIM MACK: OK, the tape's rolling. HAPPY HALLOWEEN, first of all! RANDAL MALONE: Happy Halloween to you, my friend. How are you? JM: I'm great. It's good to finally be doing this. I'm happy. RM: Well I am too. I was in the pool, actually it's about 4:30 in the morning here, and I said, 'My gosh! I'm supposed to be doing an interview at four, and I'm in the pool!' So I jumped out, wrapped up in a robe, and ran upstairs... but I'm ready now, just fire away. Great! Of course, we're going to talk about FRANKENSTEIN RISING, but first of all, I'd like you to tell me your memories about the first time you saw the original 1931 version of FRANKENSTEIN, with Boris Karloff. Oh, gosh. I was probably five or six, the first time I saw it. I lived in Kentucky, that's where I was born, in Owensboro, Kentucky. We had a late-night channel... I'm thinking it was Channel 7, or possibly Channel 25, but I think it was Channel 7... and we had a program on called TALES FROM THE TOMB. Late at night, on Fridays and Saturdays is when it came on, and they would play all of the old Universal horror films. And I was so jazzed, so excited. Definitely, did it have a bearing... did it warp me as a child? God, I hope so! I would think so, yes. (Laughs). Because I ended up earning my living doing, you know, just that. So it definitely had an impact on who I would become. Anyway, one night, they showed FRANKENSTEIN, and I was just, you know, enamored. They had to scrape me off the ceiling! In those days, TVs were bigger. They were like large pieces of furniture sitting in the living room, in like a maple cabinet. And I was just setting there in front of the big screen, just in awe of Karloff's Frankenstein monster, and the other characters, too. Colin Clive, 'It's Alive, It's Alive!,' and of course, Elizabeth Frankenstein, Mae Clarke. What I didn't know, what I had no way of knowing at that point when I was so young -- it was a miracle really, that later on in my life, when I had been living in California for a little while, when I was a teenager growing up, that I would actually meet Mae Clarke, and she would become a very, very close friend of mine. And I told her... so many times we talked, thank God I had many years with her -- I said, 'I love FRANKENSTEIN, it was, you know, it is definitely one of the inspirations of my life, and someday, I hope to do a Frankenstein movie. That would be a dream come true in terms of my career, and a dream come true in terms of my personal ambition.' And she... that tickled her. She said, 'Really?' And I said, 'Oh yeah,' because I just loved her in it. She was the original Elizabeth Frankenstein in James Whale's 1931 Universal production of Frankenstein. She lived in a cabin at the Motion Picture and Television Country House, and I was out there at an event. I was a young actor, as I said a teenager, out there at an event as a volunteer, and I was loving every minute of it because of all of the famous actors and people I was meeting... but of all the people I met that day, she was the one. She was the one that I was just so awestruck to be introduced to, because I loved her, and we became very good friends, and she became very good friends with my family, and with my grandmother. We would do holidays together, and we would go out once or twice a week and have lunch with her. And then I started just going out having lunch with her, as my grandmother got older, and it was just... it was a miracle! That's all I can say Jim, it was a miracle, and in her bungalow, she lived in Bungalow No. 24 at the Motion Picture and Television Country House... we used to call it the Motion Picture Home, but Mae was very, very staunch about calling it the proper term. You know, using the appropriate terminology. I would say, 'Well, you know out at the Home', or 'at the Motion Picture Home where you live...' and she would say, 'It's the Motion Picture and Television Country House.' And it wasn't just me, she corrected everybody. She was like that. But in her bungalow, No. 24, where she lived, it was so cool to be in there, she would have her awards, you know, on a shelf, on the wall, and she had this large, framed, black and white photograph of she and Boris Karloff in a scene from FRANKENSTEIN. It had a plaque with it, a gold plaque, that said, 'FRANKENSTEIN -- MAE CLARKE, BORIS KARLOFF, UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 1931.' Someone had given it to her many years ago. Well, of course I would stare at it for hours. I loved it. One day, it was for my birthday, she gave it to me as a present! That was many years ago, but still to this very day, I have been given many things by the grace of God, many blessings, but that one gift stands, you know, among the top five gifts of... The coolest of the cool! The coolest of the cool, man, you're right. One of the top five coolest things of my life. And we took it into the library, I'll never forget. She loved to hang out in the library there, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House. That was kind of her little responsibility, to keep the library organized... and we popped it out of frame, so she could of course, autograph it to me. She loved my being Irish, and she would claim to be half Irish. I would learn later, after she had passed away, that her name was really Klotz! And I don't ever remember her telling me that herself, you know, that's kind of a German name, but she would always say, 'Well, I'm half Irish.' She would love to write little Irish limericks to me, on cards, and on pictures, and at special times of the year. So on the FRANKENSTEIN picture of she and Karloff, she wrote: "To Randy Darlin', the Man of Malone, There is no quarrelin', he's a star, 'twil be shown." You know, it was amazing! And then she wrote, "Boris Karloff thanks you, James Whale thanks you, Colin Clive thanks you, and Randy dear, I thank you. Love Always, Mae Clarke." And then she dated it, May 29. And it's an amazing thing, that exactly 23 years to the very day that she dated that picture, May 29, was the day we started filming FRANKENSTEIN RISING. Mae wrote it, she put it in the universe, and 23 years later... It came to be. Yeah! It all came to be. And that's the truth, may God strike me dead -- she would say that too, 'May God strike me' -- and I still have the photograph hanging up in my house. Is this picture... is it a frame from the movie, or an on-the-set photo? It's a still from the movie. It's Karloff he's just entered the window of Elizabeth's bedroom, she's sitting on the Chaise lounge, and she's sitting there looking very worried about who? About Henry! About Colin Clive. And by the way, she told me many, many times, all her stories of the filming of Frankenstein. And I just hung on every syllable that fell out of her mouth, because I was so, again, just, enamored, in awe of, beguiled, by these stories of she and Karloff, and Colin Clive and James Whale. I am going to ask you ALL about those stories, in our next interview! OK. Well, she was wonderful, and I have so many, not just memories, but beautiful pictures of our life, and our friendship together. Sadly, we lost her. She died April 22, 1992. March 8 of that year was the last time I ever saw her alive. I spoke to her on the phone a few days before she died, but March 8 was the last time I ever went out and visited her. And it's interesting that April 22, 1992, was the day of the L.A. riots. I remember saying when I got the phone call, 'Mae, you picked a great day to check out, because it's not real good around here today.' It was the first day of the L.A. riots, that started with the Rodney King incident, which led to a huge amount of destruction in Los Angeles during that whole week. That was the first day of it. But yeah, that photograph... she on this beautiful Chaise lounge, and Karloff's just coming up behind her. He was getting ready to go, 'ERR. ERR.' And she gets up and walks, so he comes and moves behind her, beautifully, and the monster thinks she's running from him, but she's not. It was just coincidence that she decided to get up at that moment, because she was nervous, and worried about her wedding day, and her fiancé. I also have some wonderful pictures of Mae and myself at her 80th birthday party, I'd have to check to remember the year but it was at the Hollywood Heritage Museum, and they had a guy dressed in a Frankenstein costume, who was the guy from Universal Studios who plays the monster, in the costume, you know, who walks around on the tour, for the tourists, and it was wonderful! One of the photographers took this picture of Mae, with me standing behind her, and the monster, and the monster is attacking us. When I showed that picture to my fellow cast on this movie, and the crew, and the director... they almost fainted! And guess what? That picture that was snapped all those years ago was taken by Michael W. Schwibs, who many years later would go on to become executive producer of... FRANKENSTEIN RISING! So it's such a piece of history, and it's so bizarre, you know, how it all ties in together. Well now, tell me... how did you eventually come to play the role of the monster? Again, it was something I'd wanted to do my whole career. I've been blessed, Jim, with a very amazing, and colorful, and diversified career. My favorite parts of course are playing in horror films. But you know, but there's been so much... Oh my gosh, I started in nightclubs, went to television, and did so much, but the greatest, or the most enjoyable for me -- I loved it all -- but the most memorable and the most fun I ever had, was doing the horror films. Three years prior to shooting, three years ago, the producer, David Sterling, he's the president of Sterling Entertainment, had come to me... we'd worked in a lot of films together. He is my boss of course, he is a producer, and he had come to me with this project. He said, 'I have a script about Frankenstein. I would like for you to play the monster, you know, we'll shoot it this way'... And I said, 'You know, I want to, it's a dream come true. It would mean everything to me'... But I didn't have the time then, three years ago, to dedicate to it, the way I wanted to. I wanted to not be working on anything else. You know, I've done two movies at the same time... I've even been doing three pictures at the same time. That was my limit, it almost killed me. But you know, I was so busy, and I said, 'I just you know what, I hope that you can wait, I understand David if you can't, but I want to be able to give it my all, because it's something that I've always wanted'... and he said, 'OK, you know, I understand' and he tabled it. I said 'bless you'. He said 'I'll table it and I'll wait, but do give me an answer soon, like in the next few, couple of months'. But there was enough on his plate to keep him busy, thank God, and I was certainly really, really busy. I had just finished doing PSYCHON INVADERS, and I was getting ready to start RAT SCRATCH FEVER, and I was finishing up THE CURSE OF LIZZIE BORDEN -- I did CURSE OF LIZZIE BORDEN 2 also. But I was just like, there's no way that I could tackle something so monumental... Not something you'd want to do in your spare time. You wanted to be able to devote your full attention and energy to it. There are things you can do in your spare time. You can do an interview, or you can do a television thing, E! True Hollywood Story, something like that. But to do something as important as playing the Frankenstein Monster, and this was a very special, VERY special story. It's always been a cautionary tale... So David Sterling produced, and also directed? No, he had a screenplay, which was written by Monte Hunter, and David owned the rights to it. He had it developed for me, for me to play the monster. The director was Eric Swelstad, whom I had worked with in two other pictures, and who also knew David. Now I never say 'I've got to have this director' or 'I've got to have that director'. I never do that. But I did this time. That's how important this picture was to me. I had worked with Eric on the two Lizzie Borden pictures. I insisted on him because, in my working with him then, he and I would talk on the set -- he is a wonderful director, but other than that, he is somewhat of an authority on the Frankenstein genre. He knew every film, you know, Frankenstein, the Curse of Frankenstein, the Son of Frankenstein, the Evil of... he knew everything from Universal to the Hammer productions, and that impressed me. It was a love that we shared, and I told him how I too love the Frankenstein story, and Karloff of course, and everybody else, from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee, who have played the monster. And I believe that if it's going to be done, it's going to be done right. I want to do it RIGHT. And Eric would make sure that it was done right. I'd think he would come as close as anybody in Hollywood. He would come as close as anybody because... I thought that he would come as close to anybody in Hollywood because of his knowledge and his passion. You know when you're hired to direct a picture, or you're assigned to direct a picture, you want to know about it, you really want to feel out all of the depth of character, and you want to storyboard every frame of it, but he went actually further than that, and I'd hoped that he would. He loved the project, and he had so much knowledge. Of course, it's classic, Mary Shelley wrote it, as I said, as a cautionary tale. But in doing a picture of Frankenstein in today's world, you'd have to have something that your audience could relate to. So, you say it takes place in modern times. I wanted to ask you about the plot of the movie... is it a sequel, or how it fits into the other Frankenstein movies, the time frame, and where and when it takes place? Here's one of the fascinating parts of this. To me, one of the most intriguing, without giving away too much about the film, it's kind of motion picture history, in many, many ways. What they do is, they open up in the 1840s, with the original Doctor Frankenstein and the original creation of, you know, by Mary Shelley's text, of what they're doing. And it shows them in the Frankenstein Castle, and they're in the laboratory then, the old lab, the 1840s lab... and the costumes were just magnificent. And I am the first and the only actor to ever play both monsters, the 1840s monster created by Dr. Frankenstein, and then the contemporary monster. I'm the only one to play both monsters in one motion picture. . |
'Frankenstein Rising' has Monster Potential |
An in-depth interview with FRANKENSTEIN RISING star RANDAL MALONE |
Exclusive interview by Jim Mack for dancingskeleton.com Behind the scenes photographs courtesy of Andrew Crandall. FRANKENSTEIN RISING c 2009 Sterling Entertainment, all rights reserved. |
A cast of Hollywood movie legends brings the classic horror tale into the 21st century. |
Domiziano Arcangeli as Victor Frankenstein and Randal Malone as The Monster in Sterling Entertainment's FRANKENSTEIN RISING (2009). |
This past Halloween morning (2008), I had a chance to interview film star Randal Malone by telephone about his latest (and very possibly greatest) movie project, FRANKENSTEIN RISING. JIM MACK: OK, the tape's rolling. HAPPY HALLOWEEN, first of all! RANDAL MALONE: Happy Halloween to you, my friend. How are you? JM: I'm great. It's good to finally be doing this. I'm happy. RM: Well I am too. I was in the pool, actually it's about 4:30 in the morning here, and I said, 'My gosh! I'm supposed to be doing an interview at four, and I'm in the pool!' So I jumped out, wrapped up in a robe, and ran upstairs... but I'm ready now, just fire away. Great! Of course, we're going to talk about FRANKENSTEIN RISING, but first of all, I'd like you to tell me your memories about the first time you saw the original 1931 version of FRANKENSTEIN, with Boris Karloff. Oh, gosh. I was probably five or six, the first time I saw it. I lived in Kentucky, that's where I was born, in Owensboro, Kentucky. We had a late-night channel... I'm thinking it was Channel 7, or possibly Channel 25, but I think it was Channel 7... and we had a program on called TALES FROM THE TOMB. Late at night, on Fridays and Saturdays is when it came on, and they would play all of the old Universal horror films. And I was so jazzed, so excited. Definitely, did it have a bearing... did it warp me as a child? God, I hope so! I would think so, yes. (Laughs). Because I ended up earning my living doing, you know, just that. So it definitely had an impact on who I would become. Anyway, one night, they showed FRANKENSTEIN, and I was just, you know, enamored. They had to scrape me off the ceiling! In those days, TVs were bigger. They were like large pieces of furniture sitting in the living room, in like a maple cabinet. And I was just setting there in front of the big screen, just in awe of Karloff's Frankenstein monster, and the other characters, too. Colin Clive, 'It's Alive, It's Alive!,' and of course, Elizabeth Frankenstein, Mae Clarke. What I didn't know, what I had no way of knowing at that point when I was so young -- it was a miracle really, that later on in my life, when I had been living in California for a little while, when I was a teenager growing up, that I would actually meet Mae Clarke, and she would become a very, very close friend of mine. And I told her... so many times we talked, thank God I had many years with her -- I said, 'I love FRANKENSTEIN, it was, you know, it is definitely one of the inspirations of my life, and someday, I hope to do a Frankenstein movie. That would be a dream come true in terms of my career, and a dream come true in terms of my personal ambition.' And she... that tickled her. She said, 'Really?' And I said, 'Oh yeah,' because I just loved her in it. She was the original Elizabeth Frankenstein in James Whale's 1931 Universal production of Frankenstein. She lived in a cabin at the Motion Picture and Television Country House, and I was out there at an event. I was a young actor, as I said a teenager, out there at an event as a volunteer, and I was loving every minute of it because of all of the famous actors and people I was meeting... but of all the people I met that day, she was the one. She was the one that I was just so awestruck to be introduced to, because I loved her, and we became very good friends, and she became very good friends with my family, and with my grandmother. We would do holidays together, and we would go out once or twice a week and have lunch with her. And then I started just going out having lunch with her, as my grandmother got older, and it was just... it was a miracle! That's all I can say Jim, it was a miracle, and in her bungalow, she lived in Bungalow No. 24 at the Motion Picture and Television Country House... we used to call it the Motion Picture Home, but Mae was very, very staunch about calling it the proper term. You know, using the appropriate terminology. I would say, 'Well, you know out at the Home', or 'at the Motion Picture Home where you live...' and she would say, 'It's the Motion Picture and Television Country House.' And it wasn't just me, she corrected everybody. She was like that. But in her bungalow, No. 24, where she lived, it was so cool to be in there, she would have her awards, you know, on a shelf, on the wall, and she had this large, framed, black and white photograph of she and Boris Karloff in a scene from FRANKENSTEIN. It had a plaque with it, a gold plaque, that said, 'FRANKENSTEIN -- MAE CLARKE, BORIS KARLOFF, UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 1931.' Someone had given it to her many years ago. Well, of course I would stare at it for hours. I loved it. One day, it was for my birthday, she gave it to me as a present! That was many years ago, but still to this very day, I have been given many things by the grace of God, many blessings, but that one gift stands, you know, among the top five gifts of... The coolest of the cool! The coolest of the cool, man, you're right. One of the top five coolest things of my life. And we took it into the library, I'll never forget. She loved to hang out in the library there, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House. That was kind of her little responsibility, to keep the library organized... and we popped it out of frame, so she could of course, autograph it to me. She loved my being Irish, and she would claim to be half Irish. I would learn later, after she had passed away, that her name was really Klotz! And I don't ever remember her telling me that herself, you know, that's kind of a German name, but she would always say, 'Well, I'm half Irish.' She would love to write little Irish limericks to me, on cards, and on pictures, and at special times of the year. So on the FRANKENSTEIN picture of she and Karloff, she wrote: "To Randy Darlin', the Man of Malone, There is no quarrelin', he's a star, 'twil be shown." You know, it was amazing! And then she wrote, "Boris Karloff thanks you, James Whale thanks you, Colin Clive thanks you, and Randy dear, I thank you. Love Always, Mae Clarke." And then she dated it, May 29. And it's an amazing thing, that exactly 23 years to the very day that she dated that picture, May 29, was the day we started filming FRANKENSTEIN RISING. Mae wrote it, she put it in the universe, and 23 years later... It came to be. Yeah! It all came to be. And that's the truth, may God strike me dead -- she would say that too, 'May God strike me' -- and I still have the photograph hanging up in my house. Is this picture... is it a frame from the movie, or an on-the-set photo? It's a still from the movie. It's Karloff he's just entered the window of Elizabeth's bedroom, she's sitting on the Chaise lounge, and she's sitting there looking very worried about who? About Henry! About Colin Clive. And by the way, she told me many, many times, all her stories of the filming of Frankenstein. And I just hung on every syllable that fell out of her mouth, because I was so, again, just, enamored, in awe of, beguiled, by these stories of she and Karloff, and Colin Clive and James Whale. I am going to ask you ALL about those stories, in our next interview! OK. Well, she was wonderful, and I have so many, not just memories, but beautiful pictures of our life, and our friendship together. Sadly, we lost her. She died April 22, 1992. March 8 of that year was the last time I ever saw her alive. I spoke to her on the phone a few days before she died, but March 8 was the last time I ever went out and visited her. And it's interesting that April 22, 1992, was the day of the L.A. riots. I remember saying when I got the phone call, 'Mae, you picked a great day to check out, because it's not real good around here today.' It was the first day of the L.A. riots, that started with the Rodney King incident, which led to a huge amount of destruction in Los Angeles during that whole week. That was the first day of it. But yeah, that photograph... she on this beautiful Chaise lounge, and Karloff's just coming up behind her. He was getting ready to go, 'ERR. ERR.' And she gets up and walks, so he comes and moves behind her, beautifully, and the monster thinks she's running from him, but she's not. It was just coincidence that she decided to get up at that moment, because she was nervous, and worried about her wedding day, and her fiancé. I also have some wonderful pictures of Mae and myself at her 80th birthday party, I'd have to check to remember the year but it was at the Hollywood Heritage Museum, and they had a guy dressed in a Frankenstein costume, who was the guy from Universal Studios who plays the monster, in the costume, you know, who walks around on the tour, for the tourists, and it was wonderful! One of the photographers took this picture of Mae, with me standing behind her, and the monster, and the monster is attacking us. When I showed that picture to my fellow cast on this movie, and the crew, and the director... they almost fainted! And guess what? That picture that was snapped all those years ago was taken by Michael W. Schwibs, who many years later would go on to become executive producer of... FRANKENSTEIN RISING! So it's such a piece of history, and it's so bizarre, you know, how it all ties in together. Well now, tell me... how did you eventually come to play the role of the monster? Again, it was something I'd wanted to do my whole career. I've been blessed, Jim, with a very amazing, and colorful, and diversified career. My favorite parts of course are playing in horror films. But you know, but there's been so much... Oh my gosh, I started in nightclubs, went to television, and did so much, but the greatest, or the most enjoyable for me -- I loved it all -- but the most memorable and the most fun I ever had, was doing the horror films. Three years prior to shooting, three years ago, the producer, David Sterling, he's the president of Sterling Entertainment, had come to me... we'd worked in a lot of films together. He is my boss of course, he is a producer, and he had come to me with this project. He said, 'I have a script about Frankenstein. I would like for you to play the monster, you know, we'll shoot it this way'... And I said, 'You know, I want to, it's a dream come true. It would mean everything to me'... But I didn't have the time then, three years ago, to dedicate to it, the way I wanted to. I wanted to not be working on anything else. You know, I've done two movies at the same time... I've even been doing three pictures at the same time. That was my limit, it almost killed me. But you know, I was so busy, and I said, 'I just you know what, I hope that you can wait, I understand David if you can't, but I want to be able to give it my all, because it's something that I've always wanted'... and he said, 'OK, you know, I understand' and he tabled it. I said 'bless you'. He said 'I'll table it and I'll wait, but do give me an answer soon, like in the next few, couple of months'. But there was enough on his plate to keep him busy, thank God, and I was certainly really, really busy. I had just finished doing PSYCHON INVADERS, and I was getting ready to start RAT SCRATCH FEVER, and I was finishing up THE CURSE OF LIZZIE BORDEN -- I did CURSE OF LIZZIE BORDEN 2 also. But I was just like, there's no way that I could tackle something so monumental... Not something you'd want to do in your spare time. You wanted to be able to devote your full attention and energy to it. There are things you can do in your spare time. You can do an interview, or you can do a television thing, E! True Hollywood Story, something like that. But to do something as important as playing the Frankenstein Monster, and this was a very special, VERY special story. It's always been a cautionary tale... So David Sterling produced, and also directed? No, he had a screenplay, which was written by Monte Hunter, and David owned the rights to it. He had it developed for me, for me to play the monster. The director was Eric Swelstad, whom I had worked with in two other pictures, and who also knew David. Now I never say 'I've got to have this director' or 'I've got to have that director'. I never do that. But I did this time. That's how important this picture was to me. I had worked with Eric on the two Lizzie Borden pictures. I insisted on him because, in my working with him then, he and I would talk on the set -- he is a wonderful director, but other than that, he is somewhat of an authority on the Frankenstein genre. He knew every film, you know, Frankenstein, the Curse of Frankenstein, the Son of Frankenstein, the Evil of... he knew everything from Universal to the Hammer productions, and that impressed me. It was a love that we shared, and I told him how I too love the Frankenstein story, and Karloff of course, and everybody else, from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee, who have played the monster. And I believe that if it's going to be done, it's going to be done right. I want to do it RIGHT. And Eric would make sure that it was done right. I'd think he would come as close as anybody in Hollywood. He would come as close as anybody because... I thought that he would come as close to anybody in Hollywood because of his knowledge and his passion. You know when you're hired to direct a picture, or you're assigned to direct a picture, you want to know about it, you really want to feel out all of the depth of character, and you want to storyboard every frame of it, but he went actually further than that, and I'd hoped that he would. He loved the project, and he had so much knowledge. Of course, it's classic, Mary Shelley wrote it, as I said, as a cautionary tale. But in doing a picture of Frankenstein in today's world, you'd have to have something that your audience could relate to. So, you say it takes place in modern times. I wanted to ask you about the plot of the movie... is it a sequel, or how it fits into the other Frankenstein movies, the time frame, and where and when it takes place? Here's one of the fascinating parts of this. To me, one of the most intriguing, without giving away too much about the film, it's kind of motion picture history, in many, many ways. What they do is, they open up in the 1840s, with the original Doctor Frankenstein and the original creation of, you know, by Mary Shelley's text, of what they're doing. And it shows them in the Frankenstein Castle, and they're in the laboratory then, the old lab, the 1840s lab... and the costumes were just magnificent. And I am the first and the only actor to ever play both monsters, the 1840s monster created by Dr. Frankenstein, and then the contemporary monster. I'm the only one to play both monsters in one motion picture. . |
