Letter From London: 'Beware the Moon, Lads'
Inspired by Mark Kermode's great Exorcist documentary The Fear Of God, and the lack of anything extensive on the making of American Werewolf, Paul started pre-production in January 2007.
"The film was shot here, and I was pretty certain 75% of the cast and crew would still be here, so I thought I'd see how far I could get", he says. "And I knew the last DVD came out in 2001, and it might be a respectable time for Universal to consider doing a double-dip."
After tracking down and interviewing a few cast and crew members, Paul managed to get a request off to Landis, and was surprised to get an e-mail back from him two days later.
"Landis said, 'I'm absolutely flattered but I have two questions: Why, and what the f**k do you expect to do with it?' I told him I wanted to put it on DVD, and he said 'But you don't own the rights!' And he put me in touch with Universal who told me they had no interest in releasing American Werewolf again and couldn't help." Fortunately, Paul later managed to meet Landis and prepared a five-minute presentation which won him over: "He liked what we'd done, but mostly he was impressed that three of us had just gone out and done this by ourselves with one camera and a laptop. And also he was also very flattered by some of the things that these people were saying about him and his film."
A few months later, with the help of Landis' rolodex and enthusiasm, Paul completed Beware The Moon after having interviewed all the major (and most of the minor) players, and after a gentle push from the director, it triumphantly found its rightful home on the recently released American Werewolf Blu-ray, which exists, Paul is convinced, as a subtle marketing push for Universal's forthcoming The Wolfman. Whatever the reason, his documentary serves as the definitive chronicle on the production, and it's great. Against all the odds, naïvete, ambition and passion won through. Allow your faith in the world to be restored, for today at least.
Tally-ho, bitches.
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Back in 1981, two high school chums and I ventured on Laker Airways across the pond, eating Wimpy burgers, staying in a basement flat in Streatham that smelled of mildew, using our Britrail passes. Heaven. Even bought "84 Charing Cross Road" at 84 Charing Cross Road, which is maybe a Gap or Starbucks or Slug and Lettuce or something. Anyway, one of my fondest memories is of walking into the Sherlock Holmes Pub ("Hey, we can drink even though we're 17!!!") and having it go completely silent. We split. Nobody even had to call us Perfumed Ponces. Ah, but that didn't happen until 1986. Or was it 1969?