Making-of documentary of Larry Lo Presti's "The Flea People." 1999 was the year Larry first brought me onto one of his movie projects. Larry knew me more... from the Gallery scene and knew I was a filmmaker and a performer, and Robert and April Anderson (the then-future stars of "American Alien") had worked previously with Jeff Cochran on "Punk James. I brought in Jeff Cochran, along with my wife, to help shoot this documentary footage of one of the first nights of production on "The Flea People. Officially in the movie, I was to play April's redneck father, hence the full beard. But tonight, I was "the guy in the suit". I always wanted to play a monster in a movie and I relished the experience of working the creature costume.
As you can see, at this point, Larry is shooting on 16mm film. But after seeing this edited documentary footage, he became a convert to video, and planned to start production all over again on Hi-8. However, we lost our lead stars when Robert and April moved to Taos, New Mexico along with Jeff Cochran. The wind sorta got knocked out of the project's sails. In 2000, Larry and I would reunite on a new project, "Night of the Necroluna" and I would also be reunited with Jeff, Robert and April (This time as my girlfriend) in "American Alien", a talking-head mockumentary about the disappearance of a UFO fanatic (me).
Some notes about the Flea-monster costume: Laryy built the prototype mould full size iin his usual papier mache' fashion. THEN, with a coat of Viva paper towels and liquid latex painted over the creature, the sculpture became a POSITIVE mould to shape the costume. Oncetthe latex skin has cured, Larry carefully cuts away the skin from the mould, then carefully reassembles it with more liquid latex.
The Mine entrance set is another large-scale corrugated/papier mache' construct, which you can see plainly in the shots behind the set where I as the monster am waiting to crash through and attack the unwitting humans.
On this night, we shot all the monster stuff first, so I could get out of the costume, then shot the simpler stuff with just the two human characters walking onto the scene afterward.
You'll see my poster art for the movie at the very end. The music is the opening theme music I composed for the project, attempting a lush Bernard Herrmanesque score on my keyboards.
