June 5, 2005

You can go home again

Filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler hadn’t set foot in his hometown in 46 years. Now, he hopes to immortalize Reading and its people in his latest movie project.

By Al Walentis Reading Eagle

RAY DENNIS STECKLER heads out of the Peanut Bar late one Friday evening, just as two ambulances race past. His Sony digital camcorder ever at his side, Steckler heads out on Penn Street and zooms in as the ambulances wail into the night.

The light is dim. The money shot may be gone, but Steckler is excited that he captured one cool image.

How will it fit into his latest movie?

Steckler can find a way. He’s the guy who worked Kogar the ape into "Rat Pfink a Boo Boo" after someone offered him a free gorilla costume. And he cooked up an entire feature, "Blood Shack," after getting permission to shoot at a creepy old building in the Nevada desert.

Now Steckler is working in his biggest location of all. His hometown

Steckler left Reading in 1959, heading west to pursue his dream of making movies. Growing up on South 10 th Street as a kid, Steckler shot 8 mm home movies of himself and his pals, dressed up as pirates and rafting on the Schuylkill River or acting out other adventures at the Daniel Boone Homestead.

In Hollywood, he first made his mark as a cameraman, working as director of photography on such low-budget films as "Wild Ones on Wheels" and "Eegah" and later on TV’s "Wide World of Sports." He also shot short music films for the likes of Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, a generation before music videos became ubiquitous.

But it is the library of psychotronic films Steckler directed during the 1960s and ’70s that have endeared him to fans of low-budget horror: a Bowery Boys spoof called "The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters," "Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid-Row Slasher," the horror musical "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies" and more than a dozen others. He appeared in many of his movies under the name Cash Flagg, often working opposite his wife at the time, Carolyn Brandt.

Steckler, 67, returned home two weeks ago for his 50 th class reunion at Reading High. But this has been a working vacation. A murder-mystery set around the Pagoda has been a dream project for 20 years, since Steckler briefly headed the film school at UNLV. His new film is even more personal.

"The movie I am doing now, ‘The Long Ride Home,’ is about returning to my hometown after a long absence," he said.

Does he have a script?

"Oh, you know I don’t have a script," Steckler said, laughing.

And he’s not kidding. Steckler is legendary for seat-of-thepants filmmaking, scrounging up props and locations, casting family and friends and getting his films done against all odds on a microscopic budget.

"I look for all the things that people will let me have for a small amount of money or for free," Steckler said. "And then I create the movie around that. The people who show up are usually in my movies."

While his Reading project sounds autobiographical, Steckler said it is make-believe. Lloyd Williams, an actor friend since they worked together on "Wild Guitar" back in ’62, plays the lead role. Richard Kozlowski, a k a Rick Dennis, a classmate and co-star in "Wild Guitar," also has a part. Other roles will be filled by local residents.

Steckler uses a Felliniesque approach to casting, scouting for interesting faces in his local travels. He recruited, for instance, Brian Young, who works at the front desk of the hotel where Steckler is staying. His taped interviews could inject a cinema verite feel to his movie.

Steckler’s wife, Katherine, will co-produce the project. Al Romanis, a retired police chief from Leesport, and Gene Dobrzyn, a lifelong buddy, helped Steckler find locations. His shoots included Amanda Stoudt Elementary School, his old South 10 th Street neighborhood, Pendora Park and the Pagoda.

How it all will play out depends on what Steckler comes up with on the fly, but the ending has been worked out, he said.

"It’s the story of someone who’s looking for someone from his past," Steckler explained.
"He’s looking for a girl he knew from high school, and he comes back 46 years later. ... She wasn’t like a love affair or anything like that. She was just a buddy, the girl in the neighborhood.

"The key to it is, it was his first kiss as a teenager, and they stayed buddies until he left town. And now he doesn’t know if she exists."

The DVD revolution has been kind to Steckler, who enjoys recording commentary tracks for his old movies ("I do that all the time. People love it!") and digging up bonus material from his film vaults.

Steckler is proud that none of the projects he started went unfinished, even if it took 20 years to get the job done. He distributes his movies through his Web site at www.raydennissteckler.com and owns a video store in Las Vegas, where he also sells on DVD some 400 old Westerns, including forgotten flicks by cowboy star Jack Luden, who was born in Reading in 1902 and died in San Quentin State Prison in 1951.

Working on digital video makes financing a film easier, since shooting an extra take doesn’t mean putting up the dinner money. But Steckler doesn’t envy not having those tools when he started out in the movies.

"It wouldn’t have been me," Steckler said. "I would have been a totally different person. It would have been too easy."

Steckler’s advice to young filmmakers is to look beyond the "Blair Witch" syndrome and try something different than homemade horror. He has little respect for the current generation of genre filmmakers. While Steckler was the master of luring fannies to the seats by dreaming up a lurid title, his films were tame for their time.

Today, he said: "It’s all blood and gore. It’s all crap as far as I’m concerned."

Nor does he enjoy the megabudget FX spectacles. The same day he caught "Pearl Harbor," he said he went home and put on "From Here to Eternity" so he could watch some real airplanes.

The landscape of Reading has changed a lot in 46 years, with the great downtown movie palaces of Steckler’s childhood long gone.

"The main street I don’t even recognize it," Steckler said. "I miss all the movie theaters. I grew up in Reading at the Ritz and the Astor and the Loew’s and the Warners and the Park, and none of those are there anymore. That’s what I was looking for. Maybe a Coney Island hot dog."

But after nearly five decades away, he said: "I thoroughly, thoroughly could feel that I was home. This is my home. This is where I grew up."

Steckler videotaped the reunion for his classmates, who remembered him by his boyhood nickname, Denny. ("It could be my greatest movie. It definitely was one of my greatest adventures.") He reconnected with people from his past, old chums like Joan Kiwak Bates, "the girl with the big smile, the same great smile from kindergarten at Amanda E. Stoudt through graduation at RHS ’55; Ron Staley and Robert Smith, RHS baseball greats and also Mr. Basketball, Don Bertram ... and one lady who had not been back in 50 years, Corrine M. Price, who said, ‘I wish we could do this every year.’ "

And this time Steckler said he will look back after he goes west.

"It is hard to catch up when you miss out on a good thing," he said. "I will try to make a movie here every year starting now.

"I have the greatest studio backlot in the world, Reading Pennsylvania."

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