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Spelling on DVD
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Hollywood Freaked Show
Alex Winter was all set to unleash a wacky $10 million comedy for Fox back in 1993 until his biggest supporter, Joe Roth, walked off the lot.
Thursday, August 4, 2005
By Ian Spelling
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Anchor Bay
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Alex and Tom's Excellent Adventure
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Back in 1993, Alex Winter – yes, that Alex Winter, Bill to Keanu Reeves’ Ted in the Bill & Ted adventures – co-wrote, co-directed and starred in a bizarre bit of entertainment entitled Freaked. The film, an outlandish and surreal comedy, cast Winter as Ricky, an actor who agrees to serve as the pitchman for a chemical company, but winds up in Freek Land, where mad scientist Elijah C. Skruggs (Randy Quaid) runs a sideshow featuring hideous mutant freaks he created using the chemical he was supposed to promote. And so Ricky’s pal Ernie (Michael Stoyanov) and environmentalist companion Julie (Megan Ward) are soon transformed – and desperate to escape Freek Land and its assemblage of oddities- among them Reeves as Ortiz the Dog Boy and Mr. T as a bearded lady.
Unfortunately, after financing the movie, Fox barely released it. But Freaked gained cult favorite status over the years and now, 12 years later, Anchor Bay Entertainment has unleashed it on DVD with a raft of extras. “It had such a long history getting made originally,” Winter recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew. “It was supposed to be a down-and-dirty cult movie (co-writer/co-director) Tom Stern and I wanted to do with the band Butthole Surfers.”
“We had a really hard time getting it done that way,” he admits. “It was just too weird. The time just wasn’t right for a giant Butthole Surfers extravaganza feature film.”
As a result, Winters and Stern took their $200,000-budgeted narrative and expanded it into a more straightforward comedic narrative. “We went back out on the market with it and we sold it to Fox to do as a much bigger movie,” says Winter. “So the idea was always to make a big, very irreverent movie that was a nod to Mad Magazine and underground comics and a lot of the things we grew up with and were into.”
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Anchor Bay
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Stern, Winter on set
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“The shoot was incredibly fun,” he continues. “Tom and I were 25 years old. We’d never shot anything near this scope. We had this humungous set and all these makeup FX companies darting around the compound like it was Army base camp. The prep and shoot was extremely educational and fun. We were doing really cool and wacky stuff, but we were doing it with some of the best people in town.”
Unfortunately, then-Fox boss Joe Roth left the studio and the new administration, not sure what they had on their hands, stopped spending money. A few opticals never got finished, a potentially great soundtrack fell apart, and an amusing ad campaign that Winter and Stern devised and shot went to waste. And so a $10 million movie pretty much fell off the radar.
“It wasn’t that mysterious at all, what happened,” suggests Winter. “We made a very idiosyncratic movie for a very ballsy studio chairman and, like most chairmen of most studios, he left and went elsewhere. They usually don’t last long. The new guy came in, looked at all this guy’s stuff and was like, ‘Well, I’m going to do my own stuff.’ And that was the end of it.”
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Michael Caufield/Wireimage.com
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With Napster's Shawn Fanning
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After years of campaigning for a proper DVD release, and with help – yes, help – from Fox, Winter and Stern hooked up with Anchor Bay. They’ve made sure that the film can be viewed the way Winter and Stern intended, and they supported the myriad extras in the set: deleted scenes, a two-hour rehearsal version of the film, Winter and Stern audio commentary, artwork, a DVD-ROM script and even two short films Winter and Stern made while attending New York University.
“It’s awesome,” Winter says... “It’s a second life for this film. And I’m thrilled with the DVD. It’s a cult film and fans are big fans, even if there’s a limited number of them. So, for them, I wanted to get kind of infectious vibe of the whole creative process into the DVD release.”
“We had a lot of footage that showed, however hard we worked, how free-wheeling and fun the experience of making the movie was,” he adds. “And it’s a nice testament to the movie. I actually hadn’t seen that stuff in 14 years, and that was really fun to go back and look at it again.”
Truth be told, moviegoers haven’t seen much of Winter over the past 14 years, either. Actually, they’ve not seen him at all; Freaked represents his most recent acting credit. Instead, Winter – who is now 40, married, a father and based in Los Angeles -- has focused most of his energy over the past decade-plus on the other side of the camera.
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MGM Home Video
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The reason Winter got $10 million
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He wrote and directed an experimental indie film called Fever back in 1999, taking it to Cannes. Now, he’s writing Napster: The Shawn Fanning Biopic, a Paramount production that will chronicle the life and times of file sharing legend Shawn Fanning. Then there’s another film, a drama about foreign aid workers in Africa, that’s set up at Crossroads Films.
Even if he never acts again, few will ever forget Bill & Ted. And how could they? MGM Home Entertainment just released Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Collection, which includes both Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and also Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. The films and the characters just won’t go away, and that’s fine with Winter.
“I’m really pleasantly surprised,” he says. “Talk about a movie we did without any sense of ambition. We just made it. It was fun and small and very lightweight. The fact that the fans still love that movie and that kids are discovering it now, that’s awesome. It makes you feel proud to be in something that has legs like that.”
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