Miller time

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This article was published 16/02/2019 (2614 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dick Miller has often been referred to as a “cult actor” for two reasons.

One: He was something of a specialist in the kind of genre movies that attract a feverish fan base, from The Terminator — in which he played an ill-fated gun shop proprietor — to Gremlins (just about every time Joe Dante directed a movie, Dick Miller was in it). Miller kept especially busy in the 1950s and ‘60s due to the loyalty of exploitation producer-director Roger Corman, who gave Miller his best starring role in the 1959 dark comedy A Bucket of Blood playing phoney artist Walter Paisley, whose secret sculpting process was killing people and covering them in clay.

The second reason: Miller became a cult unto himself because, well, he was such a terrific actor. He always brought a kind of honest, streetwise integrity to even the most absurd of projects.

Corman considered him “the best actor in Hollywood” — and one should keep in mind that Corman worked with the likes of Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Robert De Niro.

Alas, Miller died on Jan. 30, a little more than a month after celebrating his 90th birthday.

Fortunately, he died leaving a history. Winnipeg film writer Caelum Vatnsdal, who authored a book on Canadian horror film in 2004 titled They Came From Within, spent six years researching and writing the story of Miller’s life for the book You Don’t Know Me But You Love Me: The Lives of Dick Miller, which was published late in the fall of last year by local imprint ARP Books.

Befitting Miller’s rollicking life and career, it’s a compelling read for his fans, but also for anyone who cares about the colourful, oft-sordid history of low-budget B-movies.

Vatnsdal last saw Miller at the actor’s 90th birthday party at his home in Toluca Lake, in California’s San Fernando Valley.

“His birthday was on Christmas, but his birthday party was on the 27th, I believe,” he says, adding there was no sign of medical trouble for the actor.

“He had closed down the party, and he was dancing with his wife quite energetically,” Vatnsdal says. “It was later on when I heard he had a small heart attack and had contracted pneumonia.”

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With Miller’s death, Vatnsdal’s book has perhaps taken on the weight of a final testament of the actor whom he elegantly describes in the book’s introduction as “a Joe Punchclock whose factory floor happened to be a soundstage.”

Vatnsdal says that though Miller seemed in good health, he felt some pressure to complete the book in time for him to read it.

“It was very important to me that I finish it on time, given his age,” he says. “Little did I know how under the wire it was.

“But he did have a chance to read the whole thing,” he says, adding that Miller gave him the most important review he could have wished.

“He was a man of few words towards the end there,” Vatnsdal says. “But he signed my copy of the book: ‘It’s beautiful, I love it.’

“At the end of his party, he shook my hand and said, ‘It hasn’t been a long friendship but it’s been very important to me,’ ” Vatnsdal says. “I think it meant quite a bit to him that his story was told in this way.”

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It is a curious phenomenon that Winnipeg writers will often step up to write about lesser-known or even obscure movie personalities.

Former Cinematheque programmer Kier-La Janisse’s 2007 book A Violent Professional is devoted to the work of Italian B-movie star Luciano Rossi. In the 2008 biography A Fuller Life, another Winnipegger, Stone Wallace, helped document the life of former B-movie starlet and Elvis songwriter Dolores Fuller, whose career highlight was handing over her angora sweater to smitten transvestite Ed Wood in the 1953 sexploitation movie Glen or Glenda.

The tendency dovetails, with filmmaker Guy Maddin’s late career penchant for remaking and re-interpreting long-lost films in a bid to rescue them from obscurity.

“When I got to know Guy and his group of friends, I found out that they were all into Corman movies and Dick Miller in particular,” Vatnsdal says, recalling a vogue period in which Maddin and his friends would get their hair cut by legendary local barber Bill Sciak.

“They’d go to Bill the Barber and ask for a ‘Fouch,’ ” Vatnsdal says, explaining Fouch was name of Dick Miller’s character in the 1960 film Little Shop of Horrors.

“So basically, they were going in and asking for Dick Miller’s haircut,” says Vatnsdal, offering his own explanation for this Winnipeg tendency.

“He’s an underdog kind of actor in an underdog kind of genre,” he says. “And this is an underdog kind of city.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing