Self-described schlockmeister Larry Buchanan was born Marcus Larry
Seale, Jr. on January 31, 1923. Orphaned at an early age, he was sent
to a Baptist orphanage. After graduating from high school in Dallas,
the 18-year-old turned down a scholarship to study the ministry at
Baylor University to accept an apprenticeship in the props department
with 20th Century-Fox Studios. Fox eventually signed Marcus Seale to an
acting contract, renaming him Larry Buchanan, the name he would keep
for his entire professional life.
Buchanan studied filmmaking in the Army Signal Corps, which made him
want to become a director. Back at Fox he played bit parts, most
notably in the Gregory Peck western
Der Scharfschütze (1950). However,
his creative interests lay elsewhere. In the early 1950s he satisfied
his desire to become a director by helming religious documentaries for
evangelist Oral Roberts. He also gained
experience as an assistant director on
Happy-End ... und was kommt dann? (1952),
directed by the legendary George Cukor.
Buchanan left behind acting for production, taking a job as a writer on
The Gabby Hayes Show (1950).
In 1951 he directed his first film, )The Cowboy (1951)_, which was
nominated for a Peabody Award. Buchanan would never again taste
critical praise, as he segued into directing low-budget exploitation
fare intended for the grindhouse circuit, the drive-in or
straight-to-television. In the late 1950s and 1960s he directed movies
for drive-in exploitation specialist American-International Pictures,
churning out such celluloid travesties as
The Eye Creatures (1967),
In the Year 2889 (1969)
and
Das Geschöpf der Zerstörung (1968).
With some of the lowest-rated films to chart on the Internet Movie
Database, Buchanan gave legendary Z-movie "shlockmeister"
Edward D. Wood Jr. a run for the
roses for the title of "Worst Director Ever." In her NY Times obituary
of Buchanan, Margalit Fox wrote: "One quality united Mr. Buchanan's
diverse output: It was not so much that his films were bad; they were
deeply, dazzlingly, unrepentantly bad. His work called to mind a famous
line from H.L. Mencken who, describing
President Warren G. Harding's prose,
said, 'It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it'."
Buchanan directed a series of low-budget films in the early 1960s
addressing such topical and taboo issues as sex
(Under Age (1964)) and racial
relations/miscegenation
(Free, White and 21 (1963),
High Yellow (1965)), themes that were
perennial grindhouse circuit favorites. He also solidified his
reputation as a hack with a spate of ultra-low-budgeted remakes of AIP
science-fiction potboilers, including
Zontar: The Thing from Venus (1967)
and
Mars braucht Frauen (1968),
a film whose succinct title, at least, is a classic of sorts.
The year after president John F. Kennedy
was cut down by sniper bullets in his hometown of Dallas, Buchanan
exploited the event by writing and directing a fictionalized account of
the "judicial reckoning" of J.F.K.'s alleged assassin,
The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (1964).
He had been in Dallas to shoot a striptease-film at The Carousel,
Oswald-killer 'Jack Ruby''s Dallas strip joint,
which was eventually released as
Naughty Dallas (1964). The Oswald
picture was the first of what would become a lucrative vein for
Buchanan: biopics and docudramas that limned the lives of everyone from
Janis Joplin to Jesus, with
Pretty Boy Floyd,
Jean Harlow,
'Jimi
Hendrix',
Howard Hughes and
Jim Morrison thrown in for good
measure.
In the late 1960s Buchanan relocated to Texas to continue his film
career, helping to boost the Lone Star State's film industry. His
movies were made with budgets under $100,000 (a figure that
approximates about 1/30th of
Marlon Brando's daily wage on
Superman - Der Film (1978) and 1/20th of
Robert Redford's daily haul on
Die Brücke von Arnheim (1977), to
provide contrast with contemporaneous Hollywood budgets). Due to their
low costs and the well-developed drive-in and grind-house circuits of
the 1950s through the 1970s, almost all of Buchanan's movies finished
financially in the black. His production overhead was minimal, as he
typically was a picture's director, producer, screenwriter and editor.
In 1996 he published his memoirs, "It Came from Hunger: Tales of a
Cinema Schlockmeister." In his memoir, Buchanan called his style of
independent cinema "guerilla filmmaking." Classifying Buchanan as a
genius of his genre, Rob Craig said on Horror-Wood.com: "Buchanan wrote
or adapted prime pieces of pulp genre fiction on assignment, filmed
them as best he could given his resources, and offered the results to
the world with no apologies, nor any revisionist strings attached."
Buchanan was completing the editing of his last movie at his home in
Phoenix, Arizona when he died on December 2, 2004, two months shy of
his 82nd birthday. He considered "The Copper Scroll of Mary Magdalene,"
a story based on a Gnostic interpretation of Christ, to be his finest
film. The man who had turned down the chance to become a minister had
been working on the film since 1972. Returning to his roots, the film
had became the goal of his career, and was an expression of his
artistic as well as religious passion.
Buchanan was survived by wife of 52 years, Jane, by his sons Randy,
Barry, and Jeff, and by his daughter Dee.
