In the winter of 1979, an iconic director was going mad, working on the most terrifying motion picture of his career, one to rival THE SHINING in intensity — but the plot was nothing compared to the true horror going on behind the scenes…
The only thing that could be worse than Nicholson would be two madmen actors on set.
Written by James Joplin. Words copyright by the author, 2015. Used by permission. All rights to photos and media retained by their proper owners, and no rights are asserted to the media here except under fair use standards. Rights questions to be directed to webmaster at xumanitix@yahoo.com
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A RATHER FASCINATING VIDEO THAT CONNECTS TO THIS STORY CAN BE FOUND HERE:
PROPS HANDLER JEANNIE SCHORR
I think people were afraid of him. Not as a director. As a man. He would push you into corners, and I think he pushed too far.
—No one alleges that a film director drove people to mass death. Do they? I mean, not really.
No. But, I’m just saying, there was an atmosphere. One that he created.
CINEMATOGRAPHER NORMAN McCLEARY
There was always an easier way than what Richard wanted. He has us go out there, is the thing. We could have done it on a soundstage in L.A. and been home by 12 every night with a stiff drink, you know? It’s just, the idea of going to that Swiss mansion, middle of nowhere in the Alps, some crazy place where people were actually butchered and the rumors of hauntings and all that crap, that’s what the publicity department is for, I just never thought we needed that.
—And it started to work on your mind after awhile?
Well, yeah. I mean, there’s the stress and all the white noise of the movie set, of any set, and then you’re trapped, nothing out there where we shot, 80 miles to the nearest store or whatever, and it’s snowing, and weird things really do start to happen. Stuff goes missing, weird sounds, weird things people saw out the corner of their eye. We started collecting stories. And then it wasn’t so fun anymore.
—Like with the kid.
I felt so sorry for the kid. I don’t know any kid actor who wants to do it. They’re put out there by somebody. And Richard just preyed on him like an eagle tearing into a fish. But, what are you going to do? The performance was there, he was getting the performance every day. Richard was brilliant at getting things out of people.
But he was covered in blood one time. I mean, he was covered. This kid—who, no one knew where he had gone, he was missing for an hour at least, just gone—and when they find him, in the coach house of the summer mansion, way the hell out there, he’s covered in blood. No one ever knows where it came from. Kid doesn’t know. Kid can’t say. Acts like he just walked off for two minutes and everything’s normal. But it’s really, I mean, really scary to see that. Kid wandering out of this snowy house tracking all this bright, bright red blood everywhere, and… So the makeup effects guy, he’s in the shit, because people at first, on the set, you know, they really think he covered the kid with that fake blood, because the fx guy, people forget this, he had a criminal record, but… It was just really bizarre and terrible. The boy was traumatized.
—And so was his father.
Well, yeah. That’s when his father started to go.
RICHARD MAYBRICK’S WIFE VANESSA
Because he thought Richard put them up to it. Essentially, you know, abduct the kid on the set for a little while, and then when we find him, he’s covered in blood, no explanation, no one knows what’s going on. This will put everyone on edge. This will make what we shoot all the richer. But it wasn’t true. The kid’s father, Sam Ellis, he—and he was the only one looking after the kid, because they were divorced, he and his wife—he started accusing Richard of trying to make, you know, make the kid psychologically unsettled.
—or using the kid’s situation to unsettle the other actors.
To unsettle Kurt, yeah. Mainly Kurt, who is already getting pretty unstable, with the pressure of being the lead on this big film after a few flops at the theatres, and I think, pretty much everyone thinks he might’ve been on some serious drugs, and he was famously a method actor.
I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.
LEAD ACTRESS MIA ZARELLIS
—What kind of things would he do?
You mean like what he would do to stay in character, you’re asking?
—Yeah.
Well, he would… there was a bit in the movie where he starts cutting himself because he thinks there’s “bad blood” inside of him that came from Africa, when he’d been there, like maybe he caught a virus when he was in Africa. And when he came back he was deranged. This was in the script, so Kurt started cutting himself up for real. He would put these weird black tourniquets on himself, so he’d have these black tatters on his arms. He was tattooing himself with some pattern on his chest. He was listening to Wagner, Tannhauser, over and over and over. Conducting it like a maniac in his trailer. Wee hours of the morning. And I mean, neverending.
—What kind of relationship did he have with his protégé?
Brady.
—Yeah.
Well. Okay, so let’s go back a step. Brady is barely in his mid-twenties, I guess? When they’re doing this? And he’s kind of delicate, kind of messed up and wanting to be a method actor, too.
So, you look at it, and you go, this is not healthy for someone getting off heroin. Or for anyone else. The setup of the movie is, there’s a very remote, very beautiful and large Swiss mansion that is meant as a summer house and when the snows get very steep, no one goes there. The ghosts come out in the high winter, the place is inhospitable, you don’t want to be there. Right? And in Victorian times, a crazy man hired a large number of servants, and he goes up there with them, and he and his equally crazy younger brother lose their minds and deliberately gas all these servants, knock them out in the ballroom, and hack them up. And then apparently kill each other.
Now, does that seem healthy for two competitive method actors to be playing in? When they’ve both been under psychological care?
—And that’s the true story.
The 1800s part, yes, the brothers really hired the servants with the express intent of killing all of them. And then, the novel is about a normal family in the 1970s who go to this place in the winter to briefly patch up these tapestries because the father is a renowned art restorer and that’s when he has time in his schedule to do it. But they get stuck in a blizzard, and everyone goes a little crazy, especially the father and the older son, played by Brady, and then everyone dies. That’s the fiction part.
—The irony being…
Well. We go up to shoot this thing on the real place where it happened, and we get snowed in a few days, and… a lot of people end up dead.
—And it’s still not clear why.
I think it’s pretty clear why. You had an actor that had psychological problems and he got too far into character.
—But I think the debate is, which actor. Kurt Michaelson or Brady Ledgell.
VANESSA MAYBRICK
—And did the director, Richard Maybrick, put them in a mental space that made this happen?
Well, I’m not going to participate in a documentary that makes my husband out to be a mass murderer.
—No one is—
Is that what you’re saying? Cause he was a film director. He made films. Legendary films. That’s all he did. He never did anything immoral except make films.
CINEMATOGRAPHER NORMAN MCCLEARY
For me, it’s… Richard has to take some blame.
—Why?
It was very high-pressure filmmaking. It was very remote. It was very insular. You know? I couldn’t stand it, myself. I’m from Scotland, and I’m used to open spaces, and… we were stuck in that mansion for just too long.
—Do you think Brady Ledgell would’ve been alright if he wasn’t shooting this film?
I think he would’ve been shooting people up like at Colombine. He was just deeply disturbed as an individual. But Richard didn’t help him. Richard used that.
VANESSA MAYBRICK
No matter, though, you still have to look at it logical. What actually happened. I mean, I’m Irish and I like fanciful stories, but what actually happened on that set?
Here’s what happened. Richard took a young actor, Brady Ledgell, and an older method actor, Kurt Michaelson, along with a nervous actress in Mia Zarellis and a child actor whose father was, honestly, just really against all of it. And Richard pushed all of them.
There were physical altercations. There were strange things that went on. But that small skeleton crew that he put together that weekend, they were killed by a young actor who couldn’t handle the situation. But that was Brady. Those are the facts. His family has to deal with that.
It wasn’t anything Richard did as director.
You know what they say. A director just enables the magic and sometimes it becomes mayhem.
ACTRESS MIA ZARELLIS
I didn’t like Kurt. I never did. And I didn’t get along with Richard.
And he did something terrible.
He made the actors feel like they were a big joke.
Like frauds.
There was so much tension. And it was weird in that Hollywood way, you know, where it would seem friendly, congenial, but then under the surface, it really wasn’t. The little jokes would get mean.
Richard told Kurt he wasn’t an actor. He couldn’t act. He said that. And it was a joke at first. Then it wasn’t. Once we started getting tired, take after take, and the location began to get inside us a little bit, then Richard would mutter that: you’re not an actor.
So there was this time before that weekend when Kurt went on the living room set and he started smashing everything and yelling, I’m not an actor. I’m not an actor.
And he was so furious. Like homicidal. He got right up into my face because I was standing next to Richard, and he yelled, I’m not an actor.
Now I know he was really yelling at Richard, but in reality, it was my face that was getting shouted at.
And then Kurt just lost it. He started talking to the Camera Assistant Paul Helberg, like, just crazy, taunting, “Did you hear that, Paul? I’m not an actor. Paullie, do you think I’m an actor? Cause he says I’m not an actor…” and all that. Which is on film. Richard was shooting everything by then.
Kurt starts kind of manhandling Paul, who’s a young guy, really nice guy, and Kurt is shaking him, sort of like not real, just getting into his role at first, but then not. It’s really not. And he punches Paul in the face with every word. I’m. Not. An. Actor.
That’s what you’re seeing on that footage. I know it’s gone around the world by now. I’m. Not. An. Actor.
But what I realized later was, it was becoming a mantra. He was starting to try not to be an actor at all but to become a man who murders a family.
Brady saw all this. Just always watching.
And it just built from there.
CINEMATOGRAPHER NORMAN MCCLEARY
Most of what you hear is bullshit. There were some freaky-deaky things that went on, but nothing you can’t explain.
But I will say that there was an incident that I didn’t like.
Kind of stayed with me.
Kurt had started covering himself in smeared white facepaint. And red dabs. So he looked like a jester, in this full costume. Because in the final scene, the father, who has become like the Victorian killers, he dresses like they did when the murders happened…
He’s a jester killing people in this living room. And the brothers, two jesters beside him, watch it happen, almost, you could say, gleefully…
So then Brady started doing it. Dressing that way. And there was one time I went to their trailers and they were both together in there, alone, and they were being so quiet.
So quiet.
And they were both dressed that way, like jesters.
Staring at each other.
It was really getting insane, I thought, at that point. Because they didn’t have a call that day for being in costume.
So I just thought, what the bloody hell is happening on this set.
Someone needs to get us out of this.
VANESSA MAYBRICK.
Richard wanted me to leave after that.
And I saw the kid’s father, Sam, really starting to get upset. He had full intentions of killing Richard, I really believe that. Brady just beat him to it, is all.
I wasn’t there. Thank God. I did leave when Richard told me to.
Maybe Richard knew something was going to happen, I don’t know.
MIA ZARELLIS
I got out. I told them I needed a few days. And I wasn’t on the call sheets for those days so Richard had no way to object, but he was furious.
I left with his wife, and I was using her for cover, I guess.
And we all know what happened then.
Or do we? I mean, we know the reporting on it.
When there’s no word from the set, and the rescuers get up there, you got two actors dressed as harlequins and all these bodies dead one way or another.
What has always bothered me is, Sam Ellis, the actor kid’s father, he got the kid out of there. They went out in the snow. And then, at a certain point, they must have realized they couldn’t get down the mountain.
They had nowhere to go.
So why didn’t they go back in?
The boy survives. Jacob Ellis is with us. I mean, I know he had the time in the mental institution and he’s not with us all the way, and he never talks about it, never gives interviews. But he lived.
CINEMATOGRAPHER NORMAN MCCLEARY
—On Wednesday of last week, the child actor, who is now 27, sent a… sent out a statement that was in The Daily Mail in the UK.
Jacob.
—Yes. Do you know what he said?
It just said… It just said, “I am not an actor.”
—And what do you take that to mean?
Bloody hell if I know. I hope it means he’s done with this. With all this. But creepy shit, is what it is.
ACTRESS MIA ZARELLIS.
And that’s the moment I think about.
The father and the son out there.
The night of the mass murder. But outside the mansion.
To me, it’s just so disturbing. His kid is with him. They’re going to die out there in the blizzard. But they don’t go back in.
The supernatural story people have been telling is, the dad tries to break the windows on the mansion, and then on the coach house, and he tries to break back into the houses, but he can’t. The axe can’t break the windows. And this is the work of the spirits. This is the place itself wanting them. And he and his boy are meant to die.
So, and this is the heartbreaking part, because we know it’s real. He puts his body over his son’s and he keeps him safe all night, as the snow comes down. He dies. So his son can live.
But the part of the story they always leave out is that Sam Ellis had that axe with him. Who is to say what he was planning to do with it?
And for all we know, the little boy somehow took care of the father who dragged him into this winter hellhole, he took care of him real good, somehow. You know there’s insanity on the internet about his connecting with whatever was out there and it did something for him. Some kind of thing was… I’m not exactly sure what went down, but it’s in my head a lot. You think about it. You imagine it. The kid out there and he just… He ended that problem.
And then he crawled into his arms, and went to sleep for the night, knowing his dead father would protect him, be his refuge, be his shelter in the winter.
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THE CINEMATICALS 