Turning Nightmares into pleasant dreams

There are performers who get the concept of fan conventions, and there are those just go to make the quick bucks. There's always a small fear that one of your favorites will be the latter. And then there are the ones like Robert Englund, who understand that we're not just autograph seekers who want to take a picture of them. We're fans who they've made an impression on.

Now mind you, waiting for your turn to meet the horror icon best known at Freddy Krueger is a grueling task. At Monster Mania, it meant sitting on one line for about an hour, another for two hours and a third for another hour. But at the end of the day, it was so worth it. Not only does he listen to your tale of fandom, he offers up tidbits that you wouldn't have considered asking about in the first place.

Monster Mania has started doing the kind of VIP treatment I'd first experienced at Wizard World Philadelphia. Basically, it means that people who paid for the privilege can cut you in line, no matter how long you've been waiting. Which was the case here, except that even with that designation, the line stayed long and unwieldy because Robert was really conversing with each and every person he met. It wasn't just spelling your name, saying you love the person's work, maybe getting in one question and then moving on.

The VIPs in front of us never really moved. And ultimately, we got put in front of those people in the last room -- the one Robert was signing in -- because those in our row had been waiting since the doors opened that day, about three hours by that time. We benefited from being in that row. Sestra was just along for the long ride on the slow boat to Robert, she'd met him before. But she did sneak down and meet all the other Nightmare 4 cast members in attendance -- Lisa Wilcox, Danny Hassel, Tuesday Knight and Andras Jones -- ostensibly since the rest of us were awaiting the big guy.

Robert was really playing to my fellow fans. When you were near the front of the room, you could hear the stories he was telling and it made the final wait time fly by. He quipped a line from the first Nightmare, "I'll kill you slow," after someone gave him a replica of Freddy's knives glove for his picture. That made Sestra giggle, which made me giggle in turn.

With a table full of photos to choose from for the autograph, I found it a difficult choice. Sis recommended the one with the slate in the picture, since I'm a movie buff in general, and that wound up being the perfect choice. After I sat down at his table and before I could even ask a question, he queried, "Do you know the story behind this picture?" "No, tell me," I said in possibly my most girliest voice.

That picture was taken for Robert's audition scene for the original Nightmare on Elm Street. After that, they changed the look of Freddy -- his face was "dripping with goo" but they realized they would be unable to match that in every shot throughout the film. The sweater was a little smaller, the hat was altered as was part of his ear meant to be bitten off by a hound of hell.

I chuckled when he said he auditioned "while on a little show called V," because V was one of my favorites from that era. He added that he had been interested in creating a character with makeup, which he later got to do a lot more of on that show as Willie, the kind-hearted lizard alien. "I thought I'd do that forever," he said of V, and it instantly reminded me of how shocked I was when the series wasn't renewed back in the day.

He told us about how much Nightmare changed the image of Wes Craven, who was thought of more as a David Lynch-type director. He recalled a bar he used to frequent that had the poster of Craven's Last House on the Left on one side and Lynch's Eraserhead on the other.

And then he really listened to my favorite story of taking 12-year-old Sestra to the movie -- how the usher said people had run out because they couldn't handle the movie and Sestra boasted that she would be able to. And then how she subsequently got spooked during the first death and wanted to go to the bathroom, but I told her to just crouch down behind the seat instead (so I wouldn't miss any, of course.) Sestra added a bit I didn't remember about making screeching sounds like Freddy in the dead of night after that. "That's the way to do it," Robert said. "Or on the outside of the window."

We also talked about one of the recurring themes of the series -- girl power. Robert said women initially watched the first one with their hands behind their eyes, but then saw the stories were about strong females fighting a beast ... and winning. "It was the first sort of story to do that ... except for Sigourney Weaver in Alien," Englund said.

In parting, he recognized Sestra's shirt as the subtle Nightmare on Elm Street 4 reference that it was and took a good crack at my Sam Loomis' Hardware shirt -- he tried for Halloween instead of Psycho. To be fair, the doctor in Halloween is named Sam Loomis as a tribute to Psycho.

I got to talk more about the "girl power" nature of the films with Wilcox, the female lead in Nightmare 4 and 5. She clearly learned a lot from the films, as she directed me -- putting me in the perfect position for photos. Around these parts, we call that doing her best Tatum O'Neal.

She's always maintained she was a lot like Alice when she started, so it was the perfect role for her. And I could truly see both those elements in the short time I got to spend with her. The "Alice Lives" pins given away to us were a nice touch as well.

Then we met Curtis Armstrong. The man had a righteous Orphan Black shirt on, so his coolness quotient quickly went up. And then even further because he was an engaging individual. Although this past season we've been watching him in Supernatural, my favorite will probably always be Moonlighting.

So we engaged in some Blue Moon conversation. When I said he and Allyce Beasley were adorable together as Bert and Agnes, he said he had just had lunch with Allyce in New York a few weeks prior to discuss stories for the book he'll be publishing next July. Just the idea of Curtis and Allyce hanging out kind of made my heart happy.

We talked about "Atomic Shakespeare," which I had just viewed, being a stellar episode. And I added that I had seen him in a guest spot on Cybill Shepherd's next show, Cybill, in which he and Moonlighting nemesis Jack Blessing played directors. "That was a weird one," he admitted. Hope there's more to that story in the book!

When I met Lee Majors at Chiller a few years ago, he must have been under the weather, because he was on top of his game for his panel at Monster-Mania. He told great stories, although Six Million Dollar Man clearly wasn't his favorite gig. I believe the word he used was "boring." Kind of a hard hit for diehard fans like myself to take, but he was acting it and not invested in like a good pre-teen.

"Have you ever tried to run with bell bottoms on, swishing back and forth?" he asked. "Now I walk in slow motion. ... I wish I was [bionic], especially in my left knee."

But he did tell us some funny tales, and we weren't bored in the slightest. The Bigfoot episodes starred Andre the Giant in that role. "He sure threw me a long way," Majors said. "I looked up into the sun and here comes the shade. He drops down on me and I didn't feel a thing. That's how good he was. ... All day long he was drinking six packs. I never saw him go to the bathroom all day."

I even got up to the audience microphone to ask about quirky things that happened during filming. He replied that the effects guys Inky and Joe wouldn't always get everything right. "I'd go to kick in a steel door and they hadn't loosened the hinges. Or I go to bend a bar and it would be too tight. During one explosion, they set it off and burned my butt. ... There were bloopers that we'd see at the end of the season. I was with Stephanie Powers in a cave once and [her line was,] 'Are we trapped?' and I said, "Does a bear shit in the woods?'"

Of course, the upcoming Six Billion Dollar Man project starring Mark Wahlberg came up. "What a slap in the face," he said. There's also a Fall Guy project in the works with Dwayne Johnson attached.

Now he's got a great role in one of the hottest current shows in con fandom, Ash vs. Evil Dead. He plays Bruce Campbell's father and has really relished the experience so far. "The only thing I didn't like ... he starts calling me 'Pop.'"



The Fall Guy is clearly a personal favorite of Majors' since he said that character was more like him in real life. He also loved doing stunts and did about 85 in his career. "It made the day go faster. ... I used to be 6-1, I think I'm 5-11 now after all those stunts."

He's still friends with Lindsay Wagner, his bionic female counterpart, and Richard Anderson, who was on both programs. They've seen each other over the years at other conventions. "One day I said I'm tired of looking at these hairy-legged crew guys. That's when we came up with the bionic woman."

He told some great stories, among them, that his football teammates dared him to try out for The Crucible, his tiny role in his first film Strait-Jacket with Joan Crawford and friendships with Paul Newman and Elvis Presley. He enjoyed being able to bring personal favorites like Roy Rogers in as guest stars on his shows. And the best career advice he ever got was from legend Barbara Stanwyck, his co-star in The Big Valley. "Be on time, know your words, hit your marks and keep your mouth closed."

The Fright Night panel with Amanda Bearse and Stephen Geoffreys proved to be equally as fun and informative. They talked about how Roddy McDowell would tell great stories from all his years in the business -- from Charlie Chaplin to Elizabeth Taylor, and how McDowell and Chris Sarandon always treated them like peers on the set.

The cast had time to rehearse before starting the project. "We kind of knew there was something good and golden here," Amanda said. "This is icing on the cake," Stephen added. "It's what ... 30 years later? We're still talking about it."

Both Bearse and Geoffreys said writer/director Tom Holland really had a unique vision, so when Geoffreys had to spend four or five hours in the makeup chair it was well worth it. "It was all in the script," she said. "He took it very seriously, but it was so human." "When Tom had something to tell you, he put his arm around you," he added. "It was a real personal thing. I think it shows in the final product."

And that's the fan experience in a nutshell, we still think about these movies and shows fondly decades later because of the care and talent put into them back in the day.