by Daniel Robert Epstein

Arnold Drake is best known to the comic book community as the co-creator of Doom Patrol and Deadman – classics of the ‘60s – as well as his the-year run on Little Lulu. But Drake’s movie career is less known to fans of his comic work. In fact, Drake has written a number of low budget films including The Flesh Eaters which was just released in a Special Edition DVD.

The Flesh Eaters (1964) is a post-World War II horror film about an alcoholic actress, her personal assistant and their helicopter pilot who are trapped on deserted island. On this island, a Nazi scientist has created microorganisms that dissolve human flesh. Sure, like all science fiction, it may have showed some prescience on Drake’s part in regards to necrotizing fasciitis, but at the time, and even now, it was just good fun, and still holds up as much (even if there aren’t silhouettes of a space janitor and two robots at the bottom of the screen).

I got a chance to talk with Drake at his New York City home about The Flesh Eaters, his damning acapella song at the last San Diego Comicon and his latest project.

Newsarama: The Flesh Eaters is a wild movie. I’d heard of it, but I’d never seen it until I got the DVD.

Arnold Drake: I think the movie is still pretty sharp. I’m so glad we did the black and white.

NRAMA: What was the genesis for you getting involved in the production – this wasn’t your first movie, right?

AD: Right. I had written another movie before Flesh Eaters, but this is the first one that was filmed. I’d been working closely with [director] Jack Curtis, doing film work, dubbing foreign movies into the English language, that sort of thing. Of course simultaneously, I was writing a shitload of comics.

Jack and I were both interested in making a movie. First thing we wanted to do was a very socially conscious film that we wanted to shoot over in Greece about a small, Greek farming community that goes co-op and the struggle they have to buy a truck.

NRAMA: That’s a pretty deep movie…compared to The Flesh Eaters…

AD: We were determined to do that until we had a conversation one evening with an English producer who had made a film there and he had said, “You don’t ever want to make a film in Greece.” He said the labor conditions are particularly bad. That the unions will tie you up and by the time you get out of there, you will have burned up twice your budget. So he managed to scare the hell out of us. We said, “Well, we’re not going to make a socially conscious movie in Greece. What are we going to do?” We knew that if we didn’t do it soon, that we wouldn’t get it done at all. The heat would be off. So I said, “Okay. Let’s do a low-budget science fiction flick.” Jack said, “What’s it about? What’s your storyline?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea at the moment.” Jack’s wife Terri said, “Who cares? Let’s get a turkey in the butcher shop and slap it and fly it around the room and make a goddamn horror movie.” Or something like that. I sat down and came up with a plot based on this newspaper item I had read about millions of dead fish being washed up on the shore in red water. The red water really turned me on. It was a pretty wild image. Then I got into the whole idea of using a biological war technique and that produced The Flesh Eaters.

NRAMA: What made you decide to do a low budget horror film?

AD: Well, you could do it cheaply. You could almost guarantee distribution and if you got a halfway decent deal with a distributor and if he was halfway honest, you had a chance to make a pretty good dollar.

NRAMA: You were also producer as well as the writer, what were your duties?

AD: First it means you raise money. Job number two is to work with the director and the director’s assistant to put a budget together. Job number three is to stay as close to that budget as you can.

NRAMA: What made you guys choose to shoot the whole film on Long Island?

AD: The area right on the tip of Montauk had all the locations we needed. It was the second feature film that had ever been shot there. The first one had been shot about 40 years before that. It was a silent film and they brought camels out there and used the sands of Montauk as a desert.

NRAMA: With all of your other roles, why don’t appear in the film?

AD: My voice does. In the opening sequence with the boy and girl on the boat with the radio playing in the background. Jack Curtis says, “Now a hot biscuit from the old rhythm and blues album the Teen Killers singing Pete’s Beat.” I whistled it and sang it with a boogie woogie organ in the background. I wrote the song also.

NRAMA: I thought it was hysterical that [adult film pioneer] Radley Metzger was the editor on The Flesh Eaters.

AD: We had to use a lot of dummy names in order to cover us with the unions. We wanted to make a union film, but if we had made a truly union film, we couldn’t have met the budget. So we talked with the unions and they were very helpful in telling us how to abide by their scriptures and still survive.

NRAMA: That was nice of them.

AD: They were interested in what we were doing. We were trying to start feature film making in New York City. They were willing to do almost anything to help a producer in the New York City area. This was before television took over and New York became a hub of television. So they were very helpful. In order to cover ourselves, we needed somebody’s name as the editor, who was a member of the Editor’s Guild and we needed a photographer who was a member of the Photographer’s Guild and so on. Some of those names were friends or close contacts who were willing to allow us to use their credits.

NRAMA: This was also in the era of the gimmicks in theaters - people were given packets of blood at the theatre when they went to go see The Flesh Eaters, right?

AD: Yes. The reason we chose that particular distributor because we knew he was into things like that. The distributor was a clinical schizophrenic and a real nutcase. We knew it when we took him on, but we thought that he could make it through. I think he broke down half-way through, so the film was not thoroughly distributed. The first month or two it got heavy distribution and then he collapsed.

NRAMA: Though the movie is very fondly remembered and it’s become a cult classic.

AD: It is a cult favorite, yeah.

NRAMA: When did you realize that was happening?

AD: The first indication that I had was back in the ‘70s when I heard that the film had become a cult favorite in England. Over there we were not allowed to show it publicly. The censor wouldn’t permit it. So what they did to get around it was form clubs. In order to join a club to see The Flesh Eaters, you went to the box office of some local theater and bought a ticket. That made you a member of the club. I heard that because it had been condemned in that fashion it became quite popular.

NRAMA: Being banned can help.

AD: That often works actually. Back in the ‘30s and the ‘40s, publishers used to vie for condemnation. If they could just say that the book has been banned in they would have a hit on their hands.

NRAMA: Since you never got to the Greek farming film, have you gotten a chance to do more realistic based stories like that?

AD: I would say that [the graphic novel] It Rhymes with Lust is one of those because it’s about journalism, a labor union and an attempt to break a strike with the use of violence.

NRAMA: So you wrote the song in The Flesh Eaters and earlier this year you did that acapella number at San Diego Comicon, did you write a lot of songs?

AD: A fair number. I started writing in the army. I wrote a couple of shows in the army. When I got out, I wrote a lot of radio jingles and a few pop songs but I wanted to concentrate on story writing. I had two brothers who were already writing songs. I figured we were well enough represented.

NRAMA: Back before The Flesh Eaters, as you said, you were writing comics - how did writing comic books lead to films?

AD: Actually, comics was a way of going into training for filmmaking. The connection between the two is pretty obvious. A comic book is a film on paper depending on how you treat it.

NRAMA: Did producers seek out comic book writers to work with?

AD: Not openly, but some did. [Batman co-creator] Bill Finger wrote a couple. I think he was approached by a producer who knew that he was a Batman writer. A lot of them did it surreptitiously. Finger and I were pretty good friends and part of the basis of our friendship was our mutual interest in films. We liked all kinds of movies going back to silent, German, Russian, Chinese and French films. We were both particularly fond of Hitchcock’s work. At some point, Bill confessed feeling a slight guilt because the story he was working on resembled a Hitchcock story. So I said to him, “Bill, I will bet you money that Hitchcock knows about you. Not as much as you know about him, but he knows about you.”

NRAMA: Speaking of Finger, you won the first Bill Finger Award this year, and when you received the award at this year’s San Diego Comicon, you sang a song acapella that really ripped into a number of injustices in the comic industry most specifically, Stan Lee taking credit for things he didn’t do. What made you want to do that song?

AD: I thought it was a good thing to do and I was writing kind of an anthem for the San Diego show. I thought it was probably better than just making a speech of acceptance. I also wanted to do the Stan Lee joke at some point. Over the years I’ve became more and more convinced that he knowingly stole The X-Men from The Doom Patrol. I didn’t believe so in the beginning because the lead time was so short [Doom Patrol’s first appearance was in June 1963, X-Men number one came out three months later].

Over the years I learned that an awful lot of writers and artists were working surreptitiously between the two offices [Marvel and DC]. Therefore from when I first brought the idea into the [DC editor] Murray Boltinoff’s office, it would’ve been easy for someone to walk over and hear that this guy Drake is working on a story about a bunch of reluctant superheroes who are led by a man in a wheelchair. So over the years I began to feel that Stan had more lead time than I realized. He may well have had four, five or even six months.

NRAMA: Have you ever dealt much with Stan?

AD: Yeah I worked at Marvel for a while and even wrote some issues of X-Men in 1967.

NRAMA: Even though you were working for him did you ever question him about the Doom Patrol/X-Men connection?

AD: No.

NRAMA: Back to the Finger Award, what’s interesting is that the award is named after Bill Finger because they might as well call it the “Award to the People Who Got Screwed Over…”

AD: I was the one who introduced the idea for the Bill Finger Award. In 1999 they honored me with the Inkpot. My Inkpot speech was really a Bill Finger speech. It was as though Bill was there accepting the award instead of me. Bill got screwed over more than Siegel and Schuster.

NRAMA: Bill’s name certainly isn’t on every issue of Batman.

AD: Exactly. Siegel and Schuster got the credit from the beginning just about. They do get money to their estate now. Jerry Siegel’s estate has millions. Finger saw nothing. Zero. I said, “We ought to use his memory to see to it that this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.” That was in 1999 and then Jerry Robinson picked up the idea about three or four years later.

NRAMA: Bill Finger passed around 1978. Was he ever bitter?

AD: Yeah, but he was incapable of fighting back. As far as I know, he never attempted to hire a lawyer. He never did anything. He just accepted it as his fate.

NRAMA: Back to the Doom Patrol - wow did you come up with the idea for the team in the first place?

AD: The Chief is based on a cousin of mine who he died fairly recently. His name was Sidney and he was one of the last of the polio victims. He got it when he was about three years old, which would’ve been somewhere around 1930. They were beginning to wipe out the disease. Sidney had ten or twelve major operations on his legs. He wound up with a left leg that was about three inches shorter than the right one, but despite that and all the time he spent away from school, and all the loneliness that must’ve accompanied it, he got himself a degree during World War II. Naturally, they couldn’t draft him so he got a chemist’s degree at City College and went to work for Westinghouse. He worked for them for about 25 years and did some real impressive and pioneering work. One assignment he got, they said, “We made a metal we can’t cut. We made it for the rockets and it meets all of our needs except we don’t know how to cut the goddamn thing. Even diamonds won’t cut it.” So he thought about it and came up with the solution, which was controlled explosions. Bit by bit he blew the metal apart in a very straight line and that’s how they wound up cutting that metal. After Sidney had been there about 25 years, he went to Korea to work with the street kids who were the bastard sons of American soldiers and Korean girls. He wound up adopting like 14 children. I found him a very impressive gentleman. The man in the wheelchair is Sidney.

The reason I wanted a man in a wheelchair is that I had been aware from almost the outset of comics that all the kids wanted to emulate the superheroes. They wanted to be the fastest or the strongest but there wasn’t anybody who wanted to be the smartest. I decided I want a superhero for the nerds of the world.

NRAMA: Every few years DC gives the concept another go in one form or another, withy varying degrees of success. The new Doom Patrol series, which was more of a throwback to your original concept was recently cancelled though. Do you follow any of the Doom Patrol revivals at DC?

AD: Yes, I saw one of the most recent issues and didn’t like it at all.

Have you heard anything about a Deadman movie?

NRAMA: No. Have you?

AD: Yeah. One of the fans informs me that they’re working on it and that it probably will be ready by January. I also heard from another source that they were doing Deadman meets Superman and Batman in the animated cartoon.

NRAMA: Speaking of cartoons, the classic Doom Patrol just showed up in Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans.

AD: Yeah, everybody but the Chief. They can’t use the Chief because people will accuse them of stealing it from Stan Lee.

NRAMA: Did you get any compensation for the Doom Patrol appearing in the cartoon?

AD: Nothing. Royalties for actual reprints, but that’s all.

NRAMA: What are you working on now?

AD: I’m writing and drawing a series of one panel cartoons about a married couple who have been married about 50 or 60 years. It’s about the whole process of aging, what it does to the way you look at the world and what it does to the way the world looks at you. It’s about the relationship of these people with their children who think their parents are far too independent for their age. It’s a book that’s going to be published next year about the process of aging and how it’s treated in different societies at different times, going back I believe, to the Greeks.

NRAMA: So you finally tell a story about Greeks…

AD: Yeah, finally.