You see, we knew Oswald, and yet nobody ever came and interrogated us. The Warren Commission didn't ask me about Oswald. We made our film shortly after the murder of Kennedy, and we had stuff in there that is still not in the Warren Commission.

But I can tell you that Hendrix and Joplin were silenced by an ad hoc of what they call "Plausible Denial Committee," by money washed through Mexico, because of the [then] upcoming '72 election of Nixon.

It's all true, and everybody knows it in Washington, but no one can put their finger on it. And Morrison beat it! He staged his death in Paris. He didn't die until 1974, instead of '71. Very few people know that. We have the documentation.

BF: Morrison was alive for three years after staging his death?

LB: Absolutely. There was no body in the coffin, no doctor and no death certificate. We thought people would put it all together because on the very day that Morrison died in the south of France, his wife Pamela took her life here.

No one was able to put that together. And finally, of course, we decided to go ahead and do the film after a couple people got out of the act. There's only a slight reference to Nixon, very little. So it's mainly a rock story.

KG: Bill Thurman (1920-1995) was your Dick Miller, so to speak. How'd you guys get together?

LB: (laughs) Bill was a professional wrestler in Texas and -- I don't remember if it was THE EYE CREATURES or what -- maybe it was ZONTAR -- but in an early picture I needed a real tough guy to play a cop.

He and Agar got on very well, and we became very close friends. Bill became part of what I call my stock company: good, dependable day players who could probably never really make it as full-fledged stars, but certainly can make good cops, truck drivers, waitresses and so forth.

I started using the same people over and over because they were good, and Billy, believe it or not, had a tremendous international reputation. I get all kinds of letters about him.

I gave Steve McQueen his first job. When we got back to New York we were doing some looping and Steve was out with his play, intermittently, with Melvyn Douglas, and Steve was in town to see Neill. I had introduced him to her.

He came over to loop for me and said, "This is the first time I've done a loop job. I like it." And the rest, as you know, is history.

Anyway, the reason I bring Steve up is not my relationship with him, but the fact that when he saw Billy Thurman one night on television -- and at two or three in the morning he'd watch these things, not major pictures -- he called me through somebody and wanted to know who this guy is and where he could get him.

He then started using Billy. He used him right up to TOM HORN, even if it was just to have him on the set. You know, there's a lot of that going on. John Ford used to do it. Where a filmmaker would like a guy so much that, even though he wouldn't have anything for him, he'd put him on the payroll just to have him around! Just to be around to talk and to chew the fat. Talk about the old times, or whatever.

So Billy remained a friend. He worked in Texas. He did a lot of commercials. They paid for him to come out [to L.A.] and do three days. Look at Spielberg when he was doing CLOSE ENCOUNTERS!

BF: He was looking at the monitor at the beginning of the film!

LB: That's right -- Billy Thurman. And you realize they could've gotten a million actors for that, right next door.

And a lot of people did that with him. They called him in for one day. They had ten thousand people who could do that role, but they liked Billy. He had an appeal to audiences. As a cop, he took ZONTAR away from John Agar.

BF: How did you learn that your A.I.P. pix had been dubbed into Yiddish?

LB: I was at the Cannes Film Festival with GOODBYE, NORMA JEAN, which is quite a successful film of mine. I'm still getting money from it.

I was at the Carlton and I get a call from the lobby from a man using broken English who says his crew is there, and they'd like to interview me about MARS NEEDS WOMEN. And I say, "Oh, shit. Who is this? Who's kidding me?" and I hung up!

I thought it was a friend of mine having fun or drunk or something. They called right back and I had them come up. I didn't believe it but, sure enough, in come about five guys and a lady with a script in her hand, and they told me that MARS had been dubbed into Yiddish and was very successful on t.v. in Israel and throughout the Yiddish-speaking world.

And I thought through the entire hour conversation that I was being put on, so I was very guarded until it occurred to me that nobody is this good an actor. Five or six people cannot walk in and be that good. These people are serious!

So then I relaxed and started helping them.

I wish I could remember the expression that the author of the T.V. GUIDE article used to explain these pictures. He said (paraphrasing): "It is not that they are that good. In fact, many of them are very bad. But what we must study is: why do they endure? Mr. Buchanan only spent a pittance on these, and yet they continue to play."