In
2009, a pseudonymous author and private investigator using the
moniker Phaedra Starling first coined a now ubiquitous and often
contentious term: “Schroedinger’s Rapist.” Modeled on the now
familiar thought experiment of how, if presented with a cat inside a
windowless box, until that box is opened, the cat may be considered
simultaneously both alive and dead, the essay asserted that in the
present day, in the dominant patriarchal structure of society, a
woman dealing with a man, be he a stranger or a longtime presence in
their life, they are always left with that question, and “The only
way we know for sure-the only way the box can be opened, as it
were-is if the man proves himself a rapist by committing a rape,
either against us or against someone else.”
William
Byron Hillman had likely never thought deeply about any concepts tied
to Erwin Schroedinger or what we now call “toxic masculinity”
when he wrote, produced, and directed his second feature film, THE
PHOTOGRAPHER, in 1974. but he got a decent head start on how to
depict it. Though in modern interviews Hillman has retconned his film
to be read as an intentional dark comedy, and some of the choices its
leading star makes in his portrayal would probably arouse astounded
snorts in modern audiences, there are still points made about men’s
perception of women that are no laughing matter.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER initially unfolds with a familiar structure drawn
from Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM: Adrian Wilde (Michael Callan), an
outwardly avuncular photographer claiming to specialize in animal
portraits and layouts for mystery magazines, is consistently
murdering the models he hires, many times in the actual manner of the
crimes he’s ostensibly re-enacting. He lives in disillusioned
bitterness with his alcoholic mother (Barbara Nichols), whom he still
blames for a childhood incident where a one-night-stand she slept
with attempted to choke him, a somewhat stronger scenario than the
lazy Freudianism of most serial killer movies of the ‘70s pithily
summed up by comedian Robert Holmes: “Anything that is longer than
it is wide...is a penis. And anything that is not a penis, is your
mother.” Even in settings when he’s not intending to kill, such
as photographing a rare schnauzer, his mania kicks in when the dog’s
owner asks him to shoot glamour photos of her, and all he can see is
the pathetic visage of his parent. Like the Andy Summers lyric, every
woman he meets up with becomes his mother in the end. He has enough
self-awareness to attempt reaching out to a friend to confess his
crimes, and to rant at God for allowing him to live. Cosmically, it
will be an almost contrived act of God that will finally end his
killing spree.
All
of this kind of grim material seems like an odd 180 turn from a
writer/producer/director whose career has leaned more often to
family-friendly comedy (though wildly, THE PHOTOGRAPHER still carries
an unaccompanied-minors-friendly PG rating). The former actor,
stuntman, and animal trainer made his trifecta debut with THE MAN
FROM CLOVER GROVE, shot in 1972, a slapstick fantasy about a rural
toymaker (Ron Masak) whose creations spark confrontations with local
police and corporate intrigue. As he described in a blog post from
February 2018, “Back in the 70's when young filmmakers made
motorcycle, horror and T&A flicks, I did the opposite and made a
G rated goofy comedy...It's corny fun the kids loved then and still
love today.” And after making THE PHOTOGRAPHER and such detours as
writing the 1984 teen sex comedy LOVELINES and collaborating with
David Heavener on the 1990 revenge-o-matic drama RAGIN’ CAJUN,
along with other unproduced projects alluded to on the history page
at his website, since 1998, Hillman has stuck almost entirely to
kid-friendly fare as THE ADVENTURES OF RAGTIME and QUIGLEY, though he
does carry a producer-only credit on an upcoming “psychological
thriller” by Chuck Borden, PURGATORIUM. Reflecting on his career in
October 2013, he remarked, “While I have produced and directed R
rated projects that did exceedingly well at the box office and later
on home video, all have disappeared from distribution after a few
years and you can’t find a copy to rent anywhere...The G rated
films I have produced and directed are still in distribution, and all
of them have returned more in residuals than all the other projects I
have done combined.”
Entertainment industry news
clippings of the time tell of a long process of bringing THE
PHOTOGRAPHER to the screen. It was first announced in July 1972 as
the second project of Intro-Media Productions, the company created by
Hillman with career camera operator William E. Hines, following
CLOVER GROVE, and was initially planned to reunite the stars of that
film, Ron Masak and Cheryl Miller, with a script credited to Hines,
to begin shooting in November of that year. In January 1973, Hillman
was announced as director, with an intention to begin shooting in
February, with announcements that GROVE actors Spencer Milligan and
Jed Allan would be in the cast. Almost no news followed on the
project the rest of the year, likely due to Intro-Media focusing on
the sale of CLOVER GROVE to new distributor American Cinema, who
would later release the Chuck Norris films GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK and
THE OCTAGON, and promoting it in regional markets. When Michael
Callan and Barbara Nichols were announced as the new leads in January
1974, and that shooting would begin in San Francisco on the 11th of that month, Hillman was now listed as writer and director with
Hines’ name no longer mentioned, suggesting a significant change in
the script from what had originally been conceived. Production
wrapped on April 27th.
On October 21st,
it was announced that Avco Embassy had picked up distribution rights,
and it first opened in a quiet test engagement in Spokane,
Washington, on December 6th.
image courtesy of William Byron Hillman
From piecing together snatches from various interviews, once
underway, the shoot offered some challenges. In a 2017 BluRay
commentary interview with Joe Rubin of the Vinegar Syndrome label, he
stated, “When we made THE PHOTOGRAPHER we had a [pending] deal with
Avco Embassy, and Avco Embassy didn’t want us to do something
outlandish. They didn’t want nudity, they didn’t want real
slasher kind of violence...Originally we had some more outlandish
scenes planned, and they were all pulled. And we made it kind of a
mellow version [of] a thriller...a lighthearted version of [a serial
killer’s story].” In a pair of summer 2014 Facebook posts, he
said, “Directing Michael Callan was a bit strange. He was taking
the role seriously, thinking about killing Barbara Nichols...Calming
him down was like offering a virtual Xanax...Directing them was like
trying to keep up with who could tell the best story, remember their
lines and when ‘ACTION’ was shouted - go right back into
character. One minute we were laughing hysterically and then next
talking about murder.” In Richard Koper’s biography THAT KIND OF
WOMAN: THE LIFE AND CAREER OF BARBARA NICHOLS, he recounted, “She
was starting to slide into bad habits...She snuck drinks onto the set
after promising not to...[But she] promised she would never miss a
line or be late and she wasn’t...Bottom line, I loved working with
her.”
Callan’s opening scenes as Wilde would not initially seem
100% sinister to audiences in the mid-70s, though they unfold like a
parade of red flags to a present-day viewer. His demeanor and
gravelly voice comes across, as Conchata Ferrell would say in
NETWORK, “crusty but benign,” and until the moments when he
inevitably snaps, he seems no different than any other jaded
professional. Only in the presence of his mother, imminent victims,
and with God, does he openly display his full-strength rage. The
actor had established himself as a versatile song-and-dance man,
playing Riff in the original Broadway cast of WEST SIDE STORY. During
his years as a contract player at Columbia Pictures, while
occasionally playing a bad boy in films as THE VICTORS, was mostly
cast as likeable handsome types, serving as man candy for Deborah
Walley in GIDGET GOES HAWAIIAN and Jane Fonda in CAT BALLOU,
culminating in a one-season sitcom, “OCCASIONAL WIFE,” playing a
bachelor faking marriage to a co-worker so that both may advance in
their company. This was his first headlining film role as an all-out
heel, shot before the name Ted Bundy became famous, so while it is
now a cliché for serial killer tales to have almost all female
victims be attracted to their predator, it doesn’t play implausibly
here. If anything, it carries the comic veneer that Hillman suggests
was in effect, especially since in most occasions, he actively
resists the overtures of his victims, tentatively parodying the
cliché before it became one.
Meanwhile, the other men orbiting around this situation offer little
positive contrast, especially in regards to their view of women; the
low bar what separates them from Wilde is that, well, they aren’t
actively murdering anyone. Wilde’s best friend Clinton (Spencer
Milligan) has been secretly sleeping with his pal’s hated mother,
fences stolen goods through his pal’s photography studio, and at
one point selfishly asks him for a hookup to the wealthy wife of a
jeweler, unaware that Wilde killed her earlier on. Lt. Luther (Harold
J. Stone) and Sgt. Sid (Edward Andrews), the homicide detectives who
find some of his victims, at first dismiss them as suicides,
runaways, and hookers, failing to connect the dots, and spending
almost more time grousing about their own diets. Even the ostensible
heroic coroner Joe (Jed Allan), who finds the pattern between the
killings and alerts the detectives, is way more focused on his exotic
cooking, which he conducts in the morgue itself, thus literally
treating the human remains of violent crime like so much meat in his
personal kitchen. While never approaching the bleak misanthropic
nihilism of, say, Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45, the microcosm of men
Hillman presents here are not an inspiring lot. Accepting Hillman’s
framing of his story as a dark comedy, one of its rueful punchlines
is how the cops’ discovery of Wilde’s souvenirs of his killings –
the photographs – deliver more shock and emotional impact to them
than the actual dead bodies of the women at the crime scene. But
then, when they were shooting this film, Paul Simon was all over Top
40 radio proclaiming, “Everything looks worse in black and white.”
image courtesy of William Byron Hillman
The actors playing these supporting characters hew to the archetypes
they’d previously established elsewhere. Milligan and Allan had
both previously acted in CLOVER GROVE, and are essentially playing
the same kinds of roles here, Milligan as a useless associate of the
protagonist, Allan as a kooky but wise misfit who sees the bigger
picture. The presentation of Stone and Andrews as the detectives is
very much in line personality-wise with several types they had
essayed before: Stone as grave, respected authority figures, and
Andrews as petty bureaucrats. Notably, they both played such roles in
episodes of “THE TWILIGHT ZONE;” Andrews as an unctuous colleague
in “Third from the Sun” and Stone as an FAA inspector with a big
unsolved case in “The Arrival.” Stone also played an otherwise
competent detective unable to identify a unique murder weapon in an
episode of “ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS” directed by Hitchcock
himself, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”
What is
particularly striking is the uncanny manner that Callan, Milligan,
and Allan all...sort of look alike! When Clinton first shows up to
have a nooner with Wilde’s mother, he can almost be mistaken for a
blood relative, and when they are shown bowling together, you’d
almost think they’re brothers, with Clinton having a wider face and
a more slovenly demeanor. And while Joe the coroner easily stands out
from the rest of the cops at the precinct by his youth and tight
curly hair, he too has the same sort of face structure as Wilde. The
result of Hillman’s casting, in tandem with the behavior of these
three characters as respectively Chaotic Evil, Neutral, and Good,
creates an environment where, if their mugshots were presented to a
witness, they could end up second-guessing themselves, or, in the
manner of the infamous meme from “THE OFFICE,” declare they’re
all the same person.
And
here, whether Hillman intended it or not (and if he intended it, was
it for chuckles or for creeps), is where he unexpectedly lays out a
“Schroedinger’s Rapist” scenario and becomes a soothsayer of
women’s conundrums to come. Again, maybe a modern viewer calloused
by decades of crimes, culture, and snark, may dismiss Wilde’s
victims as the typical naive prey of a slasher flick, but for their
realm of knowledge in the story’s setting, they cannot be
immediately certain of his intentions until he acts on them, and
they’ve been socialized to give him the benefit of the doubt, a
deadly miscalculation. Concurrently, Clinton conducts himself like
the sleazy opportunist that he is, and while he’s ultimately not a
killer like Wilde, the winsome waitress at the bowling alley, Candy
(Patty Bodeen) has seen enough of his antics to keep him at bay,
making a judgment call that keeps her safe in the short run, though
her repeated outreach to Wilde suggests she too is giving him more
slack than is wise. It’s a Hobson’s choice she navigates every
time she goes to work. It’s doubtful Hillman ever fancied himself
some sort of sensitive new age guy – his first credit as a
producer, ODDLY COUPLED aka BETTA BETTA, has a logline so offensive
even he won’t
describe it on his own website resume – but by creating a milleu
where, as a woman, you’re marginally safer with a con artist than a
real artist, and if you do lose your life to either of them, the
police’s first instinct is to ask what you did to cause it, and the
man in charge of diagnosing your demise is doing that job in between
cooking lessons, he has lain out why all these years later, women
can’t often safely distinguish which man is a threat and which is
not.
The
question of whether this indistinguishability was intentional or not
grows curiouser upon watching Hillman & Callan’s 1982 return
to the life of Adrian Wilde, DOUBLE EXPOSURE. In present day
interviews, Hillman describes the film an an origin story or prequel
to the events of THE PHOTOGRAPHER, though it more effectively serves
as a retconning of the character, since there is little to no mention
of Wilde’s despised mother or the incident from the previous film
that scarred him, DOUBLE EXPOSURE takes away one family member, but
provides Wilde with an actual brother, B.J. (James Stacy), a stuntman
adapting to the loss of an arm and a leg, a role specifically written
for the real-life double amputee actor. And while again, the movie
presents a spate of model murders investigated by comically
ill-equipped (but this time less condescending) detectives, in this
tale there is reason to question whether or not Wilde is responsible
for the killings. Overall, it is a more straightforward and less
peculiar production than THE PHOTOGRAPHER, but by giving Wilde a
direct blood relation that bears resemblance to him and with whom
there’s mutual affection, Hillman still plays a “can you tell
these men apart, really” game.
It’s also within reason to contemplate whether Hillman’s
screenplay had been influenced in any way by one of the film’s
executive producers, another actor-turned-filmmaker, John Hayes, a
struggling playwright who took the occasional acting role in
wholesome fare as Disney’s THE SHAGGY D.A., but created films that
were anything but family friendly. Writer Stephen Thrower, in his
deeply researched history book of exploitation filmmaking NIGHTMARE
USA, wrote of Hayes, “What’s striking about [his] career
trajectory is the way that he returns, time and time again, to the
experiences of his childhood, revisiting familial traumas in a
variety of settings, from melodrama to horror to hardcore.” And
Adrian Wilde’s grudge with his mother lines up thematically with
similar instances of horrid parenting in Hayes’ films MAMA’S
DIRTY GIRLS, DREAM NO EVIL, and GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE. In his talk
with Joe Rubin on the commentary track for DOUBLE EXPOSURE, Hillman
suggests he does not need outside inspiration, saying “I don’t
want to copy anybody. I hope I don’t ever do that. Everything I try
to do is original...Everything is macabre [and] I have my own sick
mind.” Still, his and Hayes’ collective antagonists could easily
form their own bowling team.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER has been a difficult film to see from the
moment it was released. It took nearly three years for it to make
it’s journey to cinema audiences. After a brief release in upper
northwest cities in December 1974 through early January 1975, Avco
Embassy sat on the film for a long spell, then made another attempt
with a new ad campaign in the Tri-State region of
Ohio/Indiana/Kentucky from January to February 1977. Neither push
drew good reception from the few critics that deigned to review it.
During it’s pre-Christmas 1974 run in Spokane, Washington,
Spokesman-Review critic Joan Applegate threw ridiculously cruel darts
at Michael Callan’s entire career, sneering, “Callan thinks he is
going to make a comeback to filmdom and takes his role all too
seriously. For those who might remember the face or name, Callan has
starred in such celluloid greats as THE INTERNS and BECAUSE THEY’RE
YOUNG. Neither strained his talent, nor does his latest effort.”
When it arrived in Cincinnati in late January 1977, Cincinnati Post
critic Jerry Stein snarked, “Hillman’s idea of portraying a
psychotic is having star Michael Callan grunt, growl, and clench his
fists. Too bad ‘King Kong’ already has been cast.” Even with
its PG rating, the subject matter must have proven too disturbing for
television, as no network, cable, or syndicated airings can be
readily found after it left cinemas. And aside from a quiet VHS
release on Embassy’s Charter sub-label in 1987, it has been out of
circulation since. By comparison, it’s “requel” DOUBLE EXPOSURE
received a more muscular release from Crown International, its VHS
release was promoted strongly by Vestron Video, and has received
several DVD and BluRay releases to the present day.
Luckily,
Grindhouse Releasing co-founder Sage Stallone saw the film, and
became a long and vocal champion of it during his ascent as a trusted
authority on exploitation films. He ultimately elevated his support
to the strongest degree by acquiring the rights to it after Embassy
Pictures’ initial deal with Hillman expired, planning an ambitious
revival for it. Sadly, he had not yet achieved his hopes of giving it
a significant reissue when he unexpectedly died in 2012. But his
actions have made sure the elements are safe and preserved, and
Grindhouse continues to have it on their slate of upcoming
restorations.
It’s been nearly 50 years since the
filming and release of THE PHOTOGRAPHER. What was surprising and
transgressive to ‘70s audiences has significantly changed. The
predatory threat of unhinged men violating women, and the prevalent
dismissive attitudes of men on woman after violation, has not. It may
not make Hillman a prophet or a feminist, but it demonstrates that
the instincts he brought to his film were correct. As such, it’s
also what makes it inherently watchable both as a time capsule and a
time-released warning to the present day.
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