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| Bill Rebane Innerview..page
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As for
Monster A-Go Go aka Terror at Halfday – my title – I
call it the worst picture ever made. And I mean it. I departed from what I
wanted to do. First, I became aware of
 what was making money in those days in the
independent arena. American International Pictures’ Sam Arkoff, Jim
Nicholson, and Roger Corman were setting the trend. It was logical to do
something that has some exploitation values and was relatively easy to make.
After all, all it took was some kind of monster. Right?
Now, it so
happened that at that time I knew the tallest man in the world, quite well.
Henry Hight, of the vaudeville act “Low Hight and Stanley.” Henry was
six feet eight inches tall and made a perfect monster without elaborate special
effects or prosthetics.
 It was also relatively easy to take the AIP/Corman
formula and attempt to create a screenplay that would have some timeliness and
exploitation values. Besides I was itching to make a feature. I put up ten
thousand dollars of the sixty thousand Monster A-Go Go budget myself. I
only had two other investors. One was Fred Friedloeb, whose brother Burt was a
Hollywood producer and whose wife was June Travis, at that time of fading
Hollywood fame. As you know, June starred in Terror aka
Monster.
Wow, sounds
like a pretty star-studded beginning to your career when you consider you had
never even directed a feature before!
Well, the best is yet to
come. Now, here is the real story behind Monster A-Go Go, and it
involves none other than a former president! And I’ve never told this
story to anyone before, no joke!
An exclusive? Let me pour your another, Bill.
No
ice, remember?
Now, during pre-production and casting of the picture, I
was hanging out on Randolph Street one rainy day in Chicago with my associate
and press agent with a lot of guts – Larry Leverett. We were late to some
meeting so we were rushing, and practically ran over this other trench-coated
man also rushing to get under the marquee and out of the downpour.
The
trench coat wearing man happened to be Ronald Reagan.
Larry and I had few inhibitions in those days. Subsequently
we blurted out the whole concept of Terror at Halfday to Ronald Reagan,
standing there together under the marquee of the Woods Theater. We not only
recited a synopsis but made sure to tell Ronald Reagan that June Travis was
committed to the picture and that he would be the perfect star for our picture.
Reagan as star of Monster
A-Go Go? That’s even more absurd than playing second 'banana' to Bonzo
in Bedtime. What happened? Did Reagan fail the screen
test?
(laughs) You’re a real sweetheart, Dave. No, it just
so happened he knew June Travis and the Friedloeb family. This gave us
reasonable credibility as a young producer with him.
He wanted to see a
script and asked us to work out the deal with his
 agent whose name he carefully wrote on a pad of paper for us. He
said that if we could work it out he might be interested.
What made
this such an extraordinary experience, never to be forgotten by myself, is that
the man while in the twilight of his acting career but destined to be the
president of our country had no problems standing for about ten minutes with
total strangers on a Chicago sidewalk to talk about a possible role in yet
another B movie. |
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