Caelum Vatnsdal - You Don’t Know Me, But You Love Me: The Lives of Dick Miller

Copyright 2018 Caelum Vatnsdal

ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)

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Winnipeg, Manitoba

Treaty 1 Territory and Historic Mtis Nation Homeland

Canada R3B 1G7

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Cover and interior design and layout by Relish New Brand Experience.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty.

ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Vatnsdal, Caelum, author

You dont know me, but you love me : the lives of Dick Miller / Caelum Vatnsdal.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-927886-14-4 (hardcover).--ISBN 978-1-927886-18-2 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-927886-15-1 (ebook)

1. Miller, Dick, 1928-. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses--United States--Biography. I. Title.

This book is dedicated to Dick and Lainie,

and it was written for Alicia and Leander.

Acknowledgements

C learly the first individual to thank when writing a life story is the person who lived it. My permanent and unabashed gratitude goes to Dick Miller for letting me tell his tale, and equally to Lainie Miller, without whom there would hardly be a Dick, never mind a book about him. Their generosity was utter and their support unbounded. On top of that, they were extremely pleasant people to be around.

Joe Dante was of immense and invaluable aid to this project. Not only did he submit to interviews and repeated follow-up questions, he helped make several important connections and provided some vital copyediting.

I am eager to thank the many other people who gave their time to speak or write to me, including Max Apple, Allan Arkush, Belinda Balaski, Ira Behr, Roger Corman, Frank De Palma, Ernest Dickerson, Jon Davison, Mike Finnell, Mike Gingold, Zach Galligan, Jack Nicholson, Bill Levy, Bob Martin, Harry Northup (whose Miller reminiscences came in the form of a posted letter), Tony Randel, Scatman Jack Silverman, Scott Wheeler, and the late Eugene Miller. Id like also to acknowledge friendly, helpful gatekeepers like Mark Alan at Renfield Productions and Cynthia Brown at New Horizons. The lovely people at the Margaret Herrick Library may simply have been doing their jobs, but they deserve thanks along with their paycheques.

Some may not know how much they helped, like Brad Caslor, who kindly gifted me a stash of movie magazines that turned out to contain many articles germane to my subject; and Tasha Robinson, then of The Onion AV Club, who thought publishing an interview with Dick Miller was a good idea, and thus provided the author an extra excuse (if one were needed) to go visit him. I owe a debt, and perhaps must shake a playful fist too, at David Everitt and Fangoria magazine, who lit the fuse.

Many thanks also go to Elijah Drenner, who made a dandy movie, That Guy Dick Miller, and was nothing less than utterly helpful when I asked something of him in the course of my own project. Dave Barber, Dave DeCoteau, Kier-la Janisse, Joe Ziemba, Gary and Penny Vatnsdal and Bob and Leslie Smith, Todd Scarth and John Samson were all as fulsome in their support as I am in my gratitude to them. I am particularly grateful to Todd Besant and Irene Bindi at ARP, and to Pat Sanders for superlative editing.

The Manitoba Arts Council and the Winnipeg Arts Council provided some of the funding needed to complete this book, and I am grateful not only for their support, but for their existence.

Most of all I thank Alicia Smith and Leander Vatnsdal, both of whom I dearly love.

Contents

D ick Miller isnt a household name; hes a household face. No controlled experiment or rigorous survey has ever been conducted about this, as far as Im aware, but, based on purely anecdotal evidence, I assert hes the film actor with the greatest Who? to Oh, that guy ratio on the planet today. He has appeared in more than 200 films and television episodes; has shared the screen and traded lines with Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liza Minnelli, Boris Karloff, Robert De Niro, Leslie Nielsen, Tom Hanks, and Ethan Hawke; has been directed by Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Zemeckis, Sam Fuller, Joe Dante, and Roger Corman; has been the subject of a feature-length documentary; and he enjoys a worldwide community of true-blue fans, many more than even he knows. To paraphrase a line of dialogue from A Bucket of Blood (one of his greatest films and certainly his greatest role), man, he is in!

Perhaps, after all, he is a household name. He certainly was in my house, to which, almost every month during the 1980s, a new issue of the horror movie magazine Fangoria was delivered. Fangoria was obsessed with Miller for some reason, regularly mustering heavily illustrated multi-page articles on him that surely bewildered many a young gorehound. Why, they must have wondered, was a magazine aimed at blood-crazed teenagers and ostensibly dedicated to Monsters, Aliens and Bizarre Creatures devoting so much real estate to a craggy-faced day player of advanced middle age? But some of us knew the answer, and the obsession was contagious.

Deciphering the particulars of Millers appeal is difficult, but on an Internet message board, a fan of Millers from Midland, Texas, discussing the actors appearance at a 2009 horror convention in Dallas and in an apparent effort to pinpoint his most cherished Miller role, settled on this: Its hard to remember which film your favorite part is in when every film hes in, hes your favorite part.

This is almost inarguable. Millers performance is often dimensional where the film as a whole is not. Hes of a piece with the picture hes in, like any actor of quality, but later, when you think back on the movie youve seen, he typically stands out as a jewel in a lackluster setting. The Howling is a good picture, but even there his only real competition is a spectacular, genre-redefining, werewolf transformation; in The Terminator, another fine genre film, hes overshadowed only by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, to be fair, stands almost a foot taller than the 5' 5" Miller. In many of his movies theres no contest at all: its Millers show all the way, no matter if hes the star or 37th down the cast list playing Cab Driver.