Bill Rebane's Giant Spider Invasion Part Two

By: John Thonen
Date: Thursday, May 02, 2002

Director Bill Rebane's 1975 giant spider flick, appropriately called THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION, is making its debut on DVD this week courtesy of Retromedia. Today we continue our chat with Rebane about the origins of the entertaining and well-remembered film.

"[Screenwriter] Robert [Easton] is a professor at the University of California, where he taught writing, and it was his idea to inject the tongue-in-cheek humor that is really what makes the film work," recalls Rebane.

Easton viewed

the film's conceptgiant spiders that travel to Earth through a black hole connecting our world to another dimensionas just too silly for anyone to ever buy. "He told me, 'Look, people are never going to take this serious, and if you go at it that way, it's never going to make it,'" says Rebane. "Now, this was strictly a coincidence, because at that time I had no idea that the spiders were going to turn out as bad as they did. But the self-mocking humor was really the only thing that saved the film, since people were going to be laughing at the monster anyway. It helped that we seemed to be laughing with them."

Easton came onboard to both play a major role as the dishonest backwoods loser who first finds the meteor that brings the initially normal-sized alien spiders to Earth and to rewrite the film's uncompleted script. "It was truly hilarious because they [the producers] took Robert and locked him in a cabin by the lake and told him that he had to finish so many pages a day or they wouldn't feed him," Rebane recalls with a hearty laugh. "Now, Robert likes his food. He's really a genuine connoisseur, so him not getting any food was just an unbelievable thought to him, but the line producer held his ground. Robert would have to write something like 10-15 pages a day if he was going to eat."

The process of approving Easton's new script pages added to Rebane's headaches since the new pages would first go to Huff, who often made his own changes, then to the producers and then back to Easton, who by then often saw little remaining of the work he'd originally done. Meanwhile, production of the film had begun and Bill Rebane had his own problems. "Eventually the script pages would get to me on the set where I was just trying to work day by day and just keep things pumping along, even though I didn't even know how the film was going to end while I was shooting it."

Meanwhile, the original plans to make the giant spider which would appear at the film's conclusion roughly ten feet in circumference had changed. "Brandon Chase said that ten feet just wasn't big enough. It has to be a really big spider, I mean a huge one, or it just isn't going to work."

Rebane's friend, [IMG4L]Bob Millay, came up with the idea to mount their spider on top of a car, so that it could travel along like a parade float, with people inside moving the legs so that it would appear to be walking, and he set about building it. "Every day I would go by the shop where the spider was being welded together," Rebane says, "and it was really progressing quite well. We figured out how the arms should work and the idea actually worked. If you look at the film, in the extreme long shots, it was almost believable."

What Rebane didn't know was that his friend wasn't handling the pressure of making the big bug all that well. "Bob was hitting the hooch pretty hard. He'd put down a case of beer before noon I found out, and once his enthusiasm for the job started to wane, the booze took over. He did alright on the body, but the face, it was really laughable. And I hated these two plastic domes he used for eyes so much that, if you look close, you can see that I had taken some food coloring and a fire extinguisher and pumped them full of colored foam to at least distort them a little. But they were just awful."

Alcohol didn't just affect Rebane's effects foreman; it was also taking a toll on his cast. "The saving grace of the film is the actors. The professionalism of Alan Hale and Barbara Hale, Robert Easton and Leslie Parrish," he says. "Steve Brodie was also a pro, but he was pretty heavy on the booze at that time. I remember one day when it was about 110 degrees outside and he was supposed to be surprised by the spider and fall and roll down this hill. Well, he already had about a half a bottle of scotch in him by that time and I really thought we were going to lose him. He passed out, heatstroke, or maybe just the booze, and for a little while, I really though we were going to lose him."

The Wisconsin summer heat was tough on Brodie, but it was even worse on the people inside the spider-costume-covered Volkswagen. "We had nine kids inside there, not teenagers, kids, including my daughter Yuta, and they were working the arms up and down, and it had to be 140 degrees in there. It's a miracle none of them passed out." The most pleasurable thing Rebane could remember about the film's overall shoot was that he and his cast and crew enjoyed hearing about similar problems another film shoot was having with the monster for their movie. "We kind of snickered about it because we were doing our whole movie for $280,000 and their monster cost more than that alone, but it wasn't working any better than ours." That movie was Steven Spielberg's JAWS.

Thanks to [IMG3R]a fabulous advertising campaign, the completed GIANT SPIDER INVASION hit big in theaters, out-grossing Robert Redford's THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR in many markets and earning more than one hundred times its production costs. But it was a success Rebane would never share in. "To tell you the truth," he says with obvious resignation today, "I never even got my full director's fee, let alone a share of the profits from the film. Somehow they managed to claim it never made a nickel."

Rebane's frustration over how the film industry treated an independent like himself made THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION his first and only film with a fairly reasonable budget. He would make five more films afterwards including THE ALPHA INCIDENT, CAPTURE OF BIGFOOT and BLOOD HARVEST, but he remained in Wisconsin, operating out of a farmstead he converted into a small studio and dubbed "The Shooting Ranch." Following a 1988 stroke, the ranch fell into bankruptcy and Rebane has, with only a couple of exceptions, stayed away from film production on a national level. He has, however, written a book about life as an independent in the film industry entitled FILM FUNDING 2000 which, he says, tells the story of how the kind of underhand accounting techniques that have recently made headlines for Enron are simply standard operating procedure for Hollywood.

Still, in spite of it all, conversation with Bill Rebane today will invariably lead to him talking about the stacks of scripts he has written and how he thinks the monster movie might be making a comeback today. He asks this writer if I've heard much about several of his old Hollywood cronies, and whether they are still in the business. It's clear that in spite of drunken effects men and actors, monsters that didn't work and heat waves that could kill a man, Bill Rebane is always thinking about getting back into the business.

"I've got [this] script about a monster that's caused by pollution. It's called ACID RAIN, and the creature is a huge maggot. You know, with today's technology, you could do that kind of monster pretty easily." It seems like it might still be a little soon to write off Bill Rebane and his monster movies. GIANT SPIDER INVASION 2 anybody?