287: Revisiting Sid Haig

Ah, shit the bed! Why, howdy, folks! Come on in! Well, from the looks of them fancy britches and sassy little hairdos, y'all ain't from around. Here, are ya?

This is Sid Hagan. You're fucking around with Movie Meltdown. Why don't you just take your mama home some chicken and then I won't have to stuff my boot all up in your ass. The following feature has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. It is intended for mature audiences and parental discretion is advised.

It's showtime, folks. Enjoy the show. Our nuclear reactor pumping out one million kilowatts of power. What's up, and welcome to Movie Meltdown. I'm Brian, and this week we're going to be debuting one of those shorter episodes we're going to be working in.

Maybe we'll call them Fun Size. I mean, we are heading towards Halloween. And what better time to. Talk to someone who is not only a horror icon. But as.

Far as I'm concerned, a film legend. Sid Haig has been in so many cool movies over the years, it's astounding. Not to mention his number of TV appearances and the hardcore fan. Base he's built over the years. He's a legend and one I consider myself lucky to have sat down and talked with.

And actually, lucky enough to talk with him more than once. Which I'll go into more in a minute here. But I did want to say, the bulk of the first part of the interview, I'm not thrilled with the sound quality. I just wanted to say that beforehand. But it's such a cool interview that I wanted to share it with you.

It's one that I'm glad you put together. But keep in mind, as you'll hear me state in a minute, it was at the time meant to be recorded just to be used for a print interview. So it wasn't planned out for it to sound good just to get Sid's quotes right. So there aren't any individual mics. It's not planned to block out any background noise.

It's just a simple recorder set on the table between us. I've worked with a file and tried to clean up the sound as best I could, but there's really only so much you can do when you. Start from a limited situation. But it's an interesting interview, and we learned some really cool things about Sid, some of which I didn't know anything about, and will probably be. News to some of you as well.

So we'll cut away here for a minute, and as we come back, you'll hear me describing the scenario to Lucy. That same day that we sat down with Sid, we did this little intro here, and I explained to her how the first interview came about, and then we'll kind of wrap up with a new piece of the interview. So we'll be back in a minute and get into our discussion with Lucy as we get into the interview with Sid. Cannibal spiders, mutant crawls, boys and goons having a ball, and a Frankenstein Dracula, and even the mummy. Are sure to end up in somebody's mummy.

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You haven't seen enough movies. All of life's riddles are answered in the movies. And now, on with the show. The mama said, come repeat the sound. So the other thing I came here specifically to do was talk to Sid Haig.

And just sort of round out this ongoing, not so real relationship. But in a press sense. He was actually, when I first started doing print interviews, he was one of the first ones I was like, okay, I need to talk to him. It's like just looking back. Well, at the time, he broke a few years before that back end with all the Rob Zombie stuff.

And I think maybe they'd already done Devil's Rejects. But either way, it's like he just sort of found this new wave of popularity. But then I remember going back and just looking at that backlog of stuff that he'd done and just being amazed by these hundreds of TV appearances and all these really cool B-movies and exploitation movies that are totally forgotten about by like, the real world. But, like, the movie geeks still, like, find this. And it's, like, it's just this list of them that are, like, some of the biggest and most ridiculous, crazy, like, B-movies you.

Could ever want. And he's, like, in so many of them. So it's, like, just that kind of career. It's, like, that's cool. And I want to find out more about this guy.

So I actually like years ago set up a print interview and I haven't done anything with it on the show. And I've been kind of waiting to sort of just have another piece to sort of cap it off because it's not really long. And as I throw it in here, it's the sound is not going to be great because this is years and years ago. This is quite a while back. And this was I'll go with recorders.

This is three recorders ago. since I've upgraded many times over the years and every step of the way, winging it sound-wise, which I'm sure anybody that listens to the show knows. It's only in the last couple. Of years do I feel like we have pieced together a good way to do these things. It's, yeah, it's such a nightmare switching from one location to the next. So it's been a learning process and this is the early stages.

So you'll hear it as we get into this. But I did want to include it somewhere along the way. I've been kind of like, I need to get that in there because it's really... interesting because I start off like way at the beginning even then like I do now with people I'm just like let's start you know really early and figure out how you get to your level of stardom or whatever career path you've chosen and his is not where I expected it to start and yeah it was kind of interesting listening to him talk about those early days so yeah I guess we'll go ahead and throw in this early clip of him and then we'll come back and I'll round it out with a little bit that. We did today. A lot of people don't realize how you started off in music.

You kind of started that way professionally. How did you get into that? When I was like nine years old, I just showed an interest in music. I started a little elementary. School band, and I did that thing.

My parents kind of got tired. Of me beating up all the pots and pans and everything, so they had a friend who was an old drummer that was looking to get rid of his trap set. And so they bought that. It just kind of evolved. So it was all the way through my school years, through high school and everything else that.

I was involved in. Playing in the orchestra, playing in the marching band, playing in the museum. I was playing every opportunity I had. And formed a band when I was in high school. And like a year after that, graduation that signed to a contract for Keen Records, Sam Cooke's label.

And things kind of took off from there. Crooked Managers, Crooked Record Company, Crooked Man with a Crooked Stick with a Crooked Dog, And I just said. You know, what the hell with this? Music. Yeah.

Did you guys try to find a recording contractor? They just heard you out there. They heard, yeah, they heard us. A friend of my father's had a recording studio. And he listened to us.

And he said, you know, you guys want to practice in the studio. Go ahead. And gave me the key to the studio, so that was kind of cool. And then he heard us one night and decided to cut a demo, did that, and then he basically sold the contract to Keen. Then you enrolled in Pasadena Playhouse.

What was that experience like? Yeah. A friend of mine and I were standing outside my parents' house trying to figure out what we were going to do with our miserable lives, and he suggested that I go to the Pasadena Playhouse. I had no idea what it was, so I checked it out. I said, oh yeah, this sounds like the kind of place for me.

So I did that, and. It was two years of doctor's help, okay? Because the first class in the morning was like 7.30 and you never got home to do any of your homework or anything else until about 11.30 that night. And that went on for two years, okay? Yeah, it was pretty hardcore.

But it gave you the discipline. That you need to be in this business. There were no little stars on your doors or anything like that, okay? You were just a grunt, being a can. Yeah, he was.

I guess for a very good reason, because you were definitely a busy, working actor for many years. Did you enjoy that life as just being a working actor? Yeah, that's what I wanted to be, you know, a working actor. I had no stars in my eyes, still don't. I knew that there was no glamour, there were no limousines or bright lights, you know.

That was just a show that happened every once in a while. Yeah. So my goal was to just become a working man when I was. Absolutely. And I worked myself out of business.

Okay. I had to restart my career like four times. Yeah. Because I was just working too much and people got tired of looking at me. Well, studios got tired of looking at me.

Yeah. Okay. So many of them. So. But now things are different.

Yeah. Now I call the shots. Definitely. Well, that was, yeah, what I was wondering was the way you always used to get cast. I mean, being an intelligent man and being a well-trained actor, how you felt about continuing to get cast as a thug over the years.

It got real tiring. Yeah. Okay. And so at one point, I think it was in 92? Yeah.

I just said, you know what? If these guys. Can't figure out that I can do more than stick a gun in somebody's face, I'm. Out of here. So I left.

And I got a call from Quentin Tarantino one day. Still don't know how he got my number. And said, I know all about, you don't want to do heavy, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. I've written a part for you in Jackie Brown. He's the judge.

Totally different. and you will do it okay and that was cool it was a good feeling to know that somebody could figure out that I could do more than what I was doing And then, of course, House of a Thousand Corpses came by and that was, now we're. Looking at history. At that point, what did you think of Captain Spalding the first time you read that novel? Well, the way that I got. It was that my agent Gave me a call and said, go to this office building, sign a letter of non-disclosure, take the script home, read it, if you like it, the part is yours.

So I did that, and I said, oh, geez, I could have a lot of fun with this. So I said, yeah, let's do it. And then, after, it was like the day after the premiere, I got a call from Robb. He said, I don't have a lot of time to talk. I got a reporter from Variety on the line.

If there's a sequel, will you do it? And I said, yes. He said, okay, I'll talk to you later. Bye. As you were reading it, or at least kind of getting familiar with the character, did you realize how much impact it would have on your career at the moment?

No, I just thought it would be something I wanted to do. Hector Spalding has a very interesting manner of speaking and a lot of interesting terminology and just the way that he speaks is it something that you came up with or was it Rob or how did his mannerisms kind of come into play? Rob gave the character a great skeleton yeah okay. And years of hanging out in biker bars and redneck bars and all of that stuff um And being a farm boy, okay, I was able to bring that culture into the character. Yeah, it's sometimes frightening to a lot of people when they're out there.

They have no idea. They're not trying to do that. They just are. Yeah, yeah. Like the ship that they're flying that now haunts you.

Where did that come from? That just came out of my head. It was something that I had probably heard a lot. And there it was. And now, it was like maybe two or three months after the film was released, I got an email from a guy who said that that.

Phrase had become. the official phrase of the college that he was going to. Okay. It says a lot about that. Yeah, right. Before the House of the Thousand Quirks came out, what were your feelings on clowns?

You know, I never got the whole clown phobia thing, you know. Clowns were funny. They were funny, they were stupid, they were, you know, whatever. But to me, they were never scary. Has it changed since you've become well-known.

In the maker? Your feelings towards it anyway? Uh, geez, I love them, you know? Yeah. Yeah, they're keeping beans on my plate.

So it's, you know, it's all good. It's Jesus, you know? And, you know, nobody can predict this kind of stuff. And, I mean, when they told us that we were going to have action figures, I went, what? These guys are despicable people.

We're going to have action figures? Yeah, okay. And to date, I think I. Have ten different models. Okay, and now there's some guy in...

In the UK, that's done a Captain Spalding bust. Yeah. They're selling it here at this convention. It's amazing. It's the sign of the time.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I think the thing that is appealing to the character is that he's fearless. I know. He doesn't take any shit from anybody, okay? You stick a gun in his face, he'll stick a chicken leg in yours, okay?

And then wind up killing you, you know? And I think, you know, people get pushed around a lot in our society. And so they can really identify. With somebody who refuses to get pushed around. But yeah, I didn't know about the music aspect at all until I started going into that.

And I think that's something that even a lot. Of people that are fans of his movies probably have no idea that he started off in music and was such a well-trained actor in the early days when he gets reduced to so many thug roles. So yeah, I thought that was really interesting. But it's still just sort of like it was relatively short and didn't have. sort of an end. So these years I've been trying to get back to, I wanted to talk to him about Spider Baby specifically.

So this is a heads up for all of you guys. We're going to do a Spider Baby episode. So just find yourself a copy now. We've got, I got some stories from him today about Spider Baby. So we're definitely going to come back to those.

But I also just wanted to sort of cap off his whole thing. So we're going to go to that now. And it's sort of more of a a wrap up on his career and like just his life. In general and his advice for others. You've been doing this for quite a while now, uh, midway.

I mean, you've, I know I've heard you tell the stories of your ups and downs professionally over the years, midway in, would you have chosen something different, you know, midway in on the rough times where you like, I should have gotten become a carpenter or something, but. I don't know, what is your take on the long haul of being a performer? Well, the thing is I had a passion for it, okay? Was I happy with the kind of work that I was being offered? No.

But I was being offered work, and it's something that I love to do. And my message to everybody, and I don't care if it's in show business or selling cars or whatever, if you have a passion for it, then you can't quit. You just have to keep going. Keep your head high, keep moving forward, and eventually it'll all come together. Very cool.

Do you have anything to pass along that you're working on to let people know about? I have got a film, hopefully going to be released fairly soon, called High on the Hog. And I'm really kind of excited about that because it was my first production job. working on the film and the crew was very energetic and wanted to really do a good job but they were a little hazy on what the job was so I went to the executive producer and I said you know you need a producer in here that can with some organizational skills that can tell these people what it is that they need to know and so he said well will you do it and I said well you got my agent's number and the next day I was a producer Very nice. So still moving into new territory as you go on.

Got to keep stretching, man. You got to keep growing. So next you'll be directing. Yes. And I've done that.

Only a whole lot of commercials and some documentaries. But yeah. All right. Well, thanks for talking to us today. Hi, this is Dick Miller, and you're listening to Movie Meltdown.

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So I do want to say thank you once again to Sid for sitting down with me, not just this week, but the first time around there as well. He's a fascinating guy. Go out there and support him. See his movies. You heard the projects he's got in the works now, so go check those out.

If you see him at a convention, go out there. He's well worth the money. I was actually surprised how little he was charging for the awesome movies he's in and the body of work that he has built over the years. To me, he was not charging that much. So my advice to you is go get him to sign a post or get a picture from him.

He's a really cool guy and it was great to get a chance to talk to him and you should go talk to him too. So find out where he's going to be this next year. I'm sure he'll make several convention stops and go out there and see him and tell him you heard him on Movie Meltdown. It'd be good if this made its way back to people sometimes that they actually... knew that we were getting the word out to people. So definitely go find Sid out there in the world and support all that he does.

And continue to support Movie Meltdown. We are working on many new projects, and we don't hear from you guys near as much as we used to, so it'd be great if you like the new format we're testing out here, or you've got some ideas of stuff you'd like us to do or want us to cover. Go ahead, send us an email. If you go to the website, there's a contact section. Send us the email.

Add that Brian Meltdown character on Facebook. He's always on there posting the latest episodes. So you can contact through there as well. But yeah, just spread the word. Put the word out when the new episodes come out.

Repost them. Send them to your friends. Get them out there in the world. Because there's no point in recording all this stuff if it's not making it out there to people. So we count on you guys to help us spread the word and pass the episode links along to people.

So please help us do that. And otherwise, just thanks for supporting us all these years. And we will continue... to bring you more episodes in the future. So I thought we would go out this episode, the only way we really can go out this episode, and it took a little digging to find, this is not the easiest single to come across these days, but I did find a version of the 1958 song Full House performed by the T-Birds with Sid Haig on drums. So we'll close things out with the T-Birds featuring Sid Haig.

Otherwise, that about does it. We will return next time, same geek feed. Thanks for listening. Come on! Come on!

Thank you. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. This episode is a production of Movie Meltdown, produced and edited by The Oddity Studios, with opening music performed by The Empires. For more on how to sponsor or support the show, email producer at moviemeltdown.com. Talk hard!