The marketplace today is so strange. People are looking for some escape theater, and I think that some people will get just as much enjoyment out of something like MISTRESS OF THE APES, which (chuckles) was made in ten days in '81. Now? That can't be done by anybody, and it was in 35mm color.

BF: But these are fun pictures.

LB: That's the key word. I can go and do something like HUGHES AND HARLOW: ANGELS IN HELL. It's a tax deal. I worked hard on it for what little money they gave me, but it was no fun because I found out in the second week of principal photography that it was to be a tax shelter.

All of a sudden all the fun went out of it. I don't play that game. That's not my world. I wanted people to see it and Nicholas Von Sternberg, Josef's son, shot the film. He shot several pictures with me.

In thirty years, I have yet to have any actor sya he would not go back to work with me for scale. Many of them have moved on up to bigger money, of course. For example, in A BULLET FOR PRETTY BOY, I gave Morgan Fairchild her first job.

BF: What happened with THE LOCH NESS HORROR?

LB: Two things were wrong. Number one, the title was wrong. It sounds like a "Loch Ness whore." You try to explain to an exhibitor you've got a film called THE LOCH NESS HORROR, he says, "LOCH NESS WHORE, what's that?"

So it's just called NESSIE. And the bloodletting was let out of it. We were trying it as straight horror. It was just not bloody enough. I am not a bloodmaker. I don't do that. Even in CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION I don't believe in running blood. I don't believe in pulling arms off of people and gushing blood.

I don't fault people who do it. After all, one of my proteges was Tobe Hooper. Fine, do that if that's your thing. I never discouraged any of them. I said, "Do what you do well. And if you happen to do, say, camp well, do it. I mean, at least you can work."

You see, the important thing in film -- and I told the students this when I talked to USC a couple times -- is to make film, and if you can't make anything but 8mm porno, do it. Make film!

Hollywood is so perimeter-bound now, that even very fine filmmakers can't start a picture because it take seven years to mount it or finance it. I'd rather see that artist go sell his car -- and many of them did in the old years -- mortgage your house and go make something you believe in.

I think Hollywood as such will be a graveyard in ten years. I think it'll all be Dallas, New York, the Bahamas, Florida, and so forth. Even the finishing is too expensive (in Los Angeles). I can fly to Dallas with all of my material and totally post-produce a film at ten cents on the dollar.

And the actors are beautiful, the crews are great. We have very fine houses of equipment. And this is true in Colorado or... not just in Texas. I happen to favor that because that's where I started.

BF: You in fact hold a record for directing in 1968, don't you?

LB: Six or seven pictures over a period of twelve to fourteen months. Some of them were the A.I.P. pictures, and I'm pretty sure I did COMMANCHE CROSSING in that time. I did what was really a feature documentary called THE OTHER SIDE OF BONNIE AND CLYDE with Burl Ives narrating, and that was interesting.

BF: How many films have you written and directed?

LB: I'd say I've done twenty to twenty-five features. Some of them even I've forgotten.

Somebody reminded me of an all-black picture I made in the swamps of East Texas in 1956. It's a 35mm black & white that we're all trying to find. They said it'd be a classic if we could find it, and I can't even remember the name of the picture! Because we were working at a time when we would maybe shoot something and say, "Okay. We've got eight titles we might use." Believe it or not, one of those titles was BLACK LIKE ME.

To answer your question, there might even have been as many features as thirty. The first one was APACHE GOLD in 1952 or '53. A funny thing is, I turned it right around and, using some of APACHE's out-takes, made another one called GRUBSTAKE, but no one understood what that title. It means funds advanced to a prospector in return for a promised share of the profits. So I had to change that one, too, but I can't remember that title, either.

Neill Adams and Jack Klugman were in all of them.

BF: What was UNDER AGE?

LB: Oh, UNDER AGE, 1964! I did that for A.I.P., but it was not in the other series, it went into theaters. A black & white film and everyone said, "Forget it."

UNDER AGE does very well in South America and all Spanish-speaking countries for the simple reason that the young man in it, who has a relationship with an under-age girl, was a Spanish boy in Dallas.

We did the film based on a real court case, as was FREE, WHITE & 21. The film was dubbed in Spanish, and based on an incredible case in Texas in which, if a young man has a relationship with an under age girl, the mother is charged with rape! Now, that's a hook, isn't it? It was very cheap. We shot it for $45,000.

Shortly after that, I did A BULLET FOR PRETTY BOY for A.I.P. and they finally gave me a little more money. A quarter of a million, but that was still nothing in Hollywood in 1970.

And yet PRETTY BOY was very successful. The numbers on television were even big, and it comes back again and again. The film has Fabian, blood and lots of action. I'm very proud of the machine gun scenes in it.

I still have that one day on every shoot where I film a scene the way I really want to film it and that's unheard of on a low budget.

BF: What are you working on now?

LB: WHO KILLED POOR MARILYN? And that's a double entendre title, because she was no poor girl, my friend. I knew the woman at Fox and I hate to see the crap that's going around about her.

Plus, I have a script which is the result of my seeing a snuff film in Rio in which they killed children. The children were bought from their parents and killed and -- as an Aquarius -- it just boils my blood.

It makes me so angry, I have a script called THE COD SQUAD about a group of young ladies, each of whom has been raped, who -- realizing the police are doing nothing about the high rate of rape and child abuse, take their knives; one of the girls is a nurse -- and castrate the men who get away from the police. It becomes a vengeance thing.

BF: How often do you hear from fans?

LB: From fans, it's almost daily. At first it was from people asking, "Where did you shoot SWAMP CREATURE or CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION?" or whatever. Many times trade people call me. They've seen one of my pictures and they ask me, "Where did you get that location?" or whatever.

There was a production manager for George Lucas who called before they made STAR WARS about Tunisia, and I got them in touch with the man who is now the liason between Tunisia and the majors.

And we even get calls from people who say, "You stole my story." The usual thing. And I say, "Check with the Writer's Guild, you'll see that we didn't."

And sometimes the fans come up with really strange questions. Believe it or not, we got a call in Dallas from Europe about STRAWBERRIES NEED RAIN saying that we had confiscated one of Bergman's pictures and had retitled it. I loved it!