PSYCHOS IN LOVE WITH MOVIES:
A POORLY-NAMED INTERVIEW WITH CARMINE CAPOBIANCO
By Mike Watt
About ten years ago, my best friend (special effects artist Bill Homan - available for film work, videos and bar mitzvahs) showed me a movie called PSYCHOS IN LOVE, which I was convinced had been made just for me. It was about a pair of immensely likable psychopathic killers who fall in love and team up to mutually fulfill their obsession with murder. It looked like it had been made for thirteen dollars. And while the acting was hardly Oscar-worthy, the two leads, played by Carmine Capobianco and Debbie Thibault, had this wonderful chemistry and comic timing and truly brought out the best in each other. Even better, and more telling that this movie was made for me, was that the script was completely riddled with references to old movies - some amazingly obscure. It ripped off the Marx Brothers as often as it could. Watching PSYCHOS IN LOVE, I was in heaven.
The 1987 PSYCHOS IN LOVE was directed by Gorman Bechard. He, Capobianco and Thibault went on to make two more movies together - GALACTIC GIGALO and CEMETERY HIGH. Neither of these later efforts managed to capture the magic and gleeful insanity of PSYCHOS, though the two leads continued to work beautifully off each other, even with the lesser material. I continue to watch PSYCHOS IN LOVE whenever I need a laugh, though I am in serious danger of wearing out Bill's rapidly-aging bootleg tape, as PSYCHOS is hard to find and has been long out of print.
Enter Tom Seymour, a screenwriter and co-partner in an independent film company called Hale Manor Productions. They produced the hilarious low-budget THRILL KILL JACK IN HALE MANOR and the very mature EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE. Tom sent me a pair of screeners for these movies for review. Imagine my delight when there, in the opening credits of both, is the name Carmine Capobianco! He's even listed as a co-producer of THRILL KILL JACK. His roles in both films are small, but funny, and conveying the same easy-going energy he displayed in his previous works. By the end of the week, I was talking to my indie hero on the phone, and he brought me up to date on what he's been up to since the wonderful PSYCHOS.
"I was actually on a soap opera - I was on ONE LIFE TO LIVE. And I did a video with Tommy Shaw; I did some extra work. But I haven't been really searching for anything. Things come across my path and I'll do them if they seem to be fun. But unless you're a major star you can't make any money. So I do it for fun. It's always been for fun. God knows I didn't make much money from PSYCHOS and GALACTIC GIGALO."
Obviously, Capobianco decided that two of those "fun" things to come along are the afore-mentioned Hale Manor productions. "Actually Tom [Seymour] is the brother of a friend of mine who is in the same business as I am. Between he and I and a third person we own five video stores. Tom was always interested in filmmaking. He came up to me one day and said "Would you be in my movie?" and I said "Sure!" So that's how I did THRILL KILL JACK and EVERYTHING MOVES ALONE."
Okay, not quite the epic story I was hoping for. The truth is, Capobianco is a businessman now, as a co-partner in the FunStuff Video independent chain, but he still retains his love for movies, particularly the older classic comedies made by the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello. The stores he runs himself in Waterbury, Connecticut, are practically overstocked with classic films. He is also the president of The Classic Movie Cinema, a grass-roots movement to show today's children older movies - to show them just what today's movies have been ripping off. ("We're trying to get kids interested in the history of motion pictures and get them to watch things that were done before 1990. Because there's so much crap coming out of Hollywood.") He still has fond memories of PSYCHOS IN LOVE.
"In fact about two days ago I got another fan letter from someone who quoted some lines from it - lines I'd never thought were very funny, but they touched him in some weird way," says Capobianco. "It must still be on a lot of people's minds, too. I'd read recently someone comparing PSYCHOS IN LOVE to SCARY MOVIE - and you can't [make that comparison]. SCARY MOVIE was just blow-job joke after blow-job joke. PSYCHOS had a few blow-job jokes, of course, but it also had references to other movies, and we ripped off the Marx Brothers, etc. At West Connecticut State University they show the movie every once in a while and I go up [and talk about making it]. The professor there thinks it's great because he gets all the references!"
PSYCHOS was the result of a growing friendship between Capobianco and director Bechard, who was fresh out of film school when they met. "Around 1988, I had a photo studio that I added a modeling agency to. [Gorman] was doing a video for some band and he was looking for a model who had a very specific look - so he called me up and gave me the specifics. I said, 'come on down'. And as we got to talking he told me that he was going to make a short film based on a short story written by another friend of his. The more we talked, the more we discovered we had in common and we decided to make a full-length. We did a movie called DISCONNECTED. I wasn't an actor - and, of course, I'm still not an actor. But he decided to give everyone on the crew a part just for fun. So I got to play a cop. And when the film was shown, people really liked that part - they had a lot of fun with that. We sold DISCONNECTED and got, oh, about� nothing for it. We sold the rights to Taiwan - the video rights - for about fifty dollars. It wasn't a great money maker.
"So he borrowed some money from his dad so we could do a video feature. He had a script, and we took it through some re-writes - which is how we started writing together. We did a movie called AND THEN, which was a big piece of crap. It really was. It didn't go anywhere, I wasn't proud of it at all. We showed it on a few local cable-access channels. One of the ones in Connecticut sent me a letter saying that I was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor award. And I thought 'Wow, that's pretty cool'. And I ended up winning! So then Gorman said 'Let's do another movie, and you star in it - because you're doing so well!' We came up with the idea and did PSYCHOS."
With Carmine as the male lead, Bechard cast his then-fiancee, Debi Thibault, in the role of Kate, the female mass-murderer and love interest. The resulting movie, PSYCHOS IN LOVE, rife with in-jokes, sight-gags, black humor, gore, nudity - it had it all. It is the movie for film-buffs. "We decided to do something that was totally off the wall, totally fun. So he wrote the first draft, gave it to me, I punched it up, and I'd give it back. He'd go over it, take out some of my stuff, give it back, I'd put it all back in. We did this for two weeks. Then we got friends together and we shot it on weekends. And there was a lot of ad-libbing. A lot of - 'hey, let's shoot another scene because we have this great location'. It was really an incredible amount of fun doing that movie, because we didn't play by any rules. We broke the fourth wall, we talked directly to the camera, we showed the microphone at one point. We just goofed around and put it on film. There was one scene that involved a misunderstanding between a few characters and the dialogue was cracking us up. And because we couldn't keep a straight face, we'd have to keep doing it over and over and over. It took place in a bar, and I'm behind the bar, wearing these stupid Hush Puppy shoes that would squish on the wet plastic floor mat, and that would crack Gorman up behind the camera. So we're cracking up over the dialogue, he's cracking up at my shoes going 'squish'. Finally, we decided to just do the scene and take whatever we got. And to this day, whenever I see that scene, I cry. It was just so much fun."
Once done, PSYCHOS played numerous midnight show circuits to much success. "[It] played at the Bleeker Street theater for what seemed like forever. We had a lot a lot of press come. And I don't know if it's true or if one of the reporters made it up, or if it was made up by someone we'd hired - but I heard that during one of the screenings, a woman had thrown up in her pocket book. Then when we went to see it, at a busy midnight showing, after the first ten or fifteen minutes, people walked out! But those who stayed ended up enjoying it. I don't think it was that gory, but the gore was part of the black humor, and not everyone gets black humor. Variety hated it. They wrote a review saying that we just ripped off EATING RAOUL. But we didn't. We ripped everyone else off."
With the movie working well in New York, Bechard decided to try his hand in L.A. "[Producer] Charlie Band - he loved it. He ended up buying it with the stipulation that we do four more pictures for him. And that was great! We could do them on 35mm now. He had us do GALACTIC GIGOLO. Which was awful. Then we did CEMETERY HIGH. Which was worse. All through this, Gorman was butting heads with Charlie Band over this and that, and ultimately, those two pictures were all we made."
While I do believe that GALACTIC GIGOLO is also a lot of fun, I must agree with Capobianco that it really isn't a good movie. Again, what saves it from being a complete throw-away is his chemistry with co-star Thibault. What brought an end to the trio's partnership, however, was CEMETERY HIGH.
"CEMETERY HIGH is a totally different movie from the script," Carmine says. "It was originally called TEENAGE SLASHER SLUT, and was a very dark comedy. There were no "hooter honks" or stuff like that, and it was very funny, more along the lines of PSYCHOS. But Gorman and Charlie were butting heads again, and I got caught in the middle in a lot of ways. So a lot of my scenes were cut because they were too dark. I was a burned out hippie, and my wife and I would roll joints the size of basketballs - it was very funny. But then it lost a lot of its charm when it went into reshoots. CEMETERY HIGH wasn't even released by Charlie Band, it was released by Unicorn Video, because Empire - Charlie's company at the time - went belly up."
The end of Empire Pictures meant the end of the contract for a fourth picture. The cast and crew all went their separate ways. "Most of the people that I liked from that period went on to do bigger and better things. Actually, Eric Lutes, a guy we really liked on PSYCHOS went on to play Del on "Caroline and the City". George, our special effects guy, went on to work on things like Jumanji. He's not getting too much work now that everything is computer generated, but for a while he was all over the place. Gorman is writing novels and directing again. Debi got married and has a family now. Everyone's doing pretty decently. I still get fan mail all the time. I've got people coming to my store just to meet me, and I find that so flattering. I believe the rights [to PSYCHOS] are still owned by Charlie Band. I've talked to Gorman over the internet, and he thinks that in 2002, they're going to do a DVD of the movie and have Gorman and I do a commentary for it. Which would be so much fun, because there's so much behind the scenes stuff that people don't know about."
Capobianco is still acting, though, in a Connecticut cable access show called "Fun Stuff with Carmine". "It's a local cable access show that we do for fun. I went on this show a couple of times - run by a guy I know - called "Land of the Free". And after a few times, he came up to me after, said 'Oh, it was a great show, but I got another job, I can't do the show anymore. Would you mind taking over for me?' So, yeah sure. I'm so easy! I'm like a whore.
"So I took over, and we changed the name of it and we've been doing it for three years. It's a lot of fun. It's like a night out with the guys. We do it live, and we just hang out and smoke and curse, talk about body parts and fart. It's just fun. We have a lot of viewers. A lot of loyal fans. Every once in a while we'll do a special show, and even though it's video rather than film, we still do some creative things. Last Halloween, I came up with this story - it was about this person who killed children on Halloween. We did it documentary style, used old photographs and used actual locations in the town and stuff. We made it very realistic. If you were in on the joke, it was hysterical, but if you didn't know, it was actually pretty frightening. We called it "The Boogeyman". So we showed it on the Thursday before Halloween, and the feedback we got at the station was confusion, panic. 'What's going on here? There was nothing in the paper about all this!' Then we showed it on Halloween night, and because it was only twenty minutes, we then went on live to take phone calls about the show, and people would call up and say 'We went on Amazon.com to get more information about these killings and we can't find anything!' We pulled the wool over everyone's eyes! To this day, people think it was real. We've showed it a couple of times since then. And Dee Snyder [of the band Twisted Sister] - who does a radio show in Hartford - had a guy call up to talk about all the killings going on every Halloween in Waterbury. It was incredible, the amount of coverage we got. They're using it at one of the colleges here to teach how media can change the course of history."
Capobianco loves to entertain, that much is obvious. He's an easy-going guy, just as he comes off in his movies. He's also literate and very funny. But he is very aware of the uncomfortable trend of lost history in this country. Founding FunStuff Video with his partners was a way for him to combat this growing trend.
"I've had kids coming in looking for an old movie, and I'll recommend something from the '40s, and they'll say "no, no, it was out last year". I was really sick and tired of these kids coming in and trying to get AMERICAN PIE - which is really not age-appropriate for a 10-11 year old kid. I'm not a prude, obviously, but my big thing is let a kid be a kid. You don't have to keep exposing him to these things. He's going to end up being desensitized to violence, desensitized to sex - think that sex is okay at any age. [The problem is] kids don't want to see anything that their friends aren't watching. I have a friend who works at one of other stores and she has two boys, and the younger one wants to be like his older brother. He only wants to watch what Andrew is watching. And I really don't recommend that she bring some of those films home [for the younger one].
"I tried an experiment - I have three wonderful daughters, they're 13, 11, and 8. I said 'Listen, I'm going to bring home a movie, and we'll sit down and watch it together. I'll surprise you.' So I brought home THE BEST OF ABBOTT AND COSTELLO. And they wrinkled their noses and said 'Who are these guys?' But we sat down and they loved it. So the next week, I brought home MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN - because that's one of the few of their movies that actually has a good story. And they loved that. And the next week I brought home BUCK PRIVATES. Before long they're reading the books I have on them, and the girls are doing "Who's On First", and having a really good time of it. Now my 8-year-old knows who the Andrews Sisters are. We'll go into stores and look through posters and she'll go 'Look, there's Marilyn Monroe! Look there's James Dean'. People are amazed - 'How does she know all that?' And I want to say 'Because I don't let my kids watch all the crap your kids watch.'
"So I think, it worked for them. They sprung from my loins, but maybe there are exceptions to the rule. Now kids come in and I'll say 'Look, take this movie - I'll give it to you for free! All you have to do is watch it and when you bring it back, let me know what you thought of it.' I started giving away more ABBOTT AND COSTELLO, and the kids started falling in love with it. They had no idea who these guys were. Now, A & C weren't the greatest comedians who ever lived, but they're funny, they're entertaining. And they're very family-oriented. A kid can watch it, an adult can watch it and still laugh. "Who's On First" is one of the most fun routines of all times. And after getting all these kids hooked, I thought, 'Well, now I have to do this on a bigger scale', so I started Classic Movie Cinema, which we're trying to raise money for. In October we did ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. And on New Year's Eve we did IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE in 3D. In March we did CAMILLE. In between reels, I'd get up and give information and history about the movies - let people learn a bit about the stuff. For IT CAME we had a whole 3D display - original posters there. Display of View Masters, 3D comics - stupid stuff that would explain how 3D works. It was an education/entertainment venue and we had a lot of fun with it. We want to get a theater open so kids can see the movies the way they should be seen, on the big screen. In a darkened theater. Not that there's anything wrong with video- that's my livelihood. But it's just totally different seeing these movies in a theater."
And what film fan can argue with that, really?
With all the news about Lackluster Video moving in and shutting the mom-and-pop chains down, it's comforting to know that places like FunStuff Video still exist. And for film-buffs, it's a relief to know that people like Capobianco are out there keeping older movies alive. "We have a real weird selection at FunStuff. I'm a terrible businessman, and could probably learn a few pointers from Blockbuster - something doesn't rent, you dump it, get rid of it, stick it in the used bin. Fill that space in your store with something that does rent. But I'm of the opinion that "if you build it, they will come". We have stuff here that rented once, if that. Now all the other video stores in the area recommend us if they don't have a particular title."
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