Academic

KATHY SHAIDLE IS ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS FOR HALLOWEEN: The Hilarious House of Frightenste?

By Ed Driscoll

KATHY SHAIDLE IS ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS FOR HALLOWEEN: The Hilarious House of Frightenstein — How Vincent Price wound up on a low-budget Canadian kids’ horror show.

Price arrived at the modest TV studio, got into makeup and costume and was handed reams of doggerel poems about some crazy characters he’d never heard of before.

He’d read each piece once, put his head down, then look up at the camera’s red light and utter his lines perfectly in one take.

Next!

New makeup, new costume, same perfect delivery, hour after hour.

Finally, it was time for a break. The weary yet exhilarated crew turned off the cameras and lights.

Then they looked around and realized that Vincent Price had disappeared.

Oh well, they said to each other, what do you expect? He’s a big star and all. Plus he’s, like, 60 years old, so he probably went for a nap…

The studio door opened a few minutes later.

It was Vincent Price and a cab driver, hauling “two-fours” of beer from the nearby Brewer’s Retail.

He handed cold stubbies out to the cast and crew and regaled them with tales of old Hollywood, his days working with Karloff and Peter Lorre and Gene Tierney and Cecil B. DeMille and all the other greats he’d known.

Then he posed for photos with everybody individually.

On an overnight rush, these were blown up into 8 x 10s, which Price personally autographed for everyone at the station.

Over the course of four days, taping over 400 of these interstitials, Price never complained, blew a line or missed a mark.

In an era when standards of conduct were collapsing, Vincent Price insisted on behaving like the well-bred gentleman he so often portrayed on screen.

Read the whole thing. Exit quote: “You may not be aware that when it was syndicated in the states in the early 70’s it aired around 4:30 in half hour format. The story we heard was that it practically cleared the streets of New York of soft drug users so that they could freak out on the Wolfman segments!”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on October 31, 2020 (boomark / email).