Robitel, Adam (2001 Maniacs)
Johnny Butane
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When you see 2001 Maniacs for the first time (pre-order it here!), chances are there wilkl be at least one character who will stand out in your head because of just how out and out strange they are. That character, for me, was Lester, the sheep-loving son of Mayor Buckman. <!– zoom:/img/story/ –>
In lining up interviews for our on-going look behind the film, director Tim Sullivan suggested I talk to Adam Robitel, who had the auspicious honor of filing the role of Lester, and I admit at first I was cautiously optimistic. I mean, he loved sheep, how much could he have to say about the movie? But Robitel is also the man responsible for “Inside the Asylum”, the 40-minute behind the scenes featurette that will be on the DVD when it hits on March 28th. Another lesson learned; a man who chases sheep with his pants down can make for a damn interesting conversation.
I chatted with Adam about his work in Maniacs, why he’s part of the Superman curse, and his possible future with The Horror Channel. Read on for the goods!
Johnny Butane: How did you get involved with 2001 Maniacs?
Adam Robitel: I’ve known Tim for many years, I believe as far back as the womb…
JB: Wow…
AR: Yeah! No, seriously, we have mutual friends, and I had done a stunt job on X-Men back in the day and met Tim through that film’s director, Bryan Singer, and it was just sort of like kismet, we just hit it off. He’s into a lot of funky things, I’m into a lot of funky things, so it was kind of like a marriage made in heaven… or hell…
JB: Tell me about your role in Maniacs.
AR: His name’s Lester, Mayor Buckman’s son, and he’s one of the original characters; in all four versions of Maniacs there is a Lester, though I think it’s spelled differently each time…
JB: You and Robert Englund (who plays Mayor Buckman) had a good amount of scenes together…
AR: Absolutely, pretty much all my scenes were with Robert, actually. One of my favorites was unfortunately cut from the movie, though. There’s a scene where a homosexual character gets rammed up the ass with a spike, lots of innards and stuff come out of his mouth… In any event, that was followed by a joke which featured myself and Jezebel, my sheep girlfriend. I’m making her a sweater and Robert asks me what I’m doing and when I tell him he says, (doing his Englund as Buckman impersonation) “Jezebel is a goddamn sweater!” (laughs)
Robert was so damn funny in that scene, but eventually they cut it out because they said it slowed down the pacing or something. I think it was a mistake, but what can you do?
JB: So it was because of the pacing of the scene…
AR: Yeah, that’s what they said, but it’s really too bad. Robert was just screaming at me, and it was so bizarre because it was such a beautiful day, with leaves on the ground, and I’m just lying down with this sheep… The sheep, by the way, was a male eunuch named Bobby. It wasn’t even a female! You know, I can almost understand their appeal. You’re lonely, on a farm; no women or warm pies around, it make sense why you’d want to slide into one…
JB: So he was friendly I take it? The sheep, I mean, not Robert…
AR: (laughs) Yeah, Robert’s a different story!
I had to learn out to maneuver the sheep in order to work with it, and the only way you can really do that is by grabbing it by it’s butt, but you have to make sure you show it who’s boss. It as tough, though, my first shot of the movie was me running across a field chasing a sheep with my pants falling down. I gotta tell you, having you big white ass glaring while chasing a sheep is not easy…
The best part is telling all my younger relatives that they can’t go see the movie yet… I try and explain “It’s got a sheep and people getting crushed and… just catch it on video when you’re old enough!” (laughs)
JB: So what was it like working with a legend?
AR: Robert? Oh, he was great. I had had this fucking nightmare when I was a kid… remember the show “Freddy’s Nightmares”?
JB: Yeah, of course…
AR: That show used to scare the shit out of me. I used to have a bunk bed and one night I woke up and turned around and the poster of football players I had on my wall turned into Freddy’s face! I screamed like a little girl; I was just freaked out for weeks. So to answer your question, it was really amazing (laughs).
As Buckman he would snap into Freddy occasionally, just a choice word here or there, you know? It was so creepy! At one point he went up to one of the pretty boy actors and said, as Freddy, “Nice to meet you. I was just masturbating to your picture in my trailer!”
JB: Nice!
AR: The dude as so freaked out! I mean, what do you say to that? (laughs)
JB: Thank you I guess?
AR: Yeah, I guess so…
JB: So did you tell Robert about your dream?
AR: I didn’t, no… I spent a lot of time listening. Robert’s got some great anecdotes, he’s obviously been working for a long time, and he loves to tell the stories.
I’ve always been fascinated by the paranormal; the supernatural and the morbid, so to actually be in a horror film was great. It was hard to really enjoy it in the moment because you’re rushing around to try and make your day, as well as make sure your performance is good, and I was also pulling double duties shooting the making-of documentary. Acting, on it’s own, is just boring because so much of a movie set is “hurry up and wait”, so every time I wasn’t performing I was running around to try and get interviews, I had the camera by my side all the time, which made it all a much more thorough experience. Because of all that, though, it was harder to enjoy the moment.
To add to that I had all these great concepts for the documentary, similar to what they did on A&E with “Curse of the Blair Witch”, which was a great documentary that filled in a lot of the holes in the mythology. So I had this whole concept similar to that that I wanted to do, but it didn’t work out. So my dreams were shattered and now I’m an alcoholic!
JB: Well that just sucks (laughs). So how did you get the gig making the behind-the-scenes doc?
AR: Tim and I talked about it beforehand, it was just a situation where I was like “look, I’m going to be there so I might as well bring my camera…” It was really weird, though, cause I had over 30 hours of footage, interviews with locals and all kinds of stuff, and then the movie changed hands and all the messes that happen to so many films when it’s trying to get released, so we had no idea if it’d ever be seen. Then Lions Gate came aboard and it all came full circle. Tim called me and said “Hey, let’s make this happen”. I had just come off of work on Superman Returns, doing all the making-of documentaries for the director, so I was free. It was a nice three-week job and I nailed out a pretty cool 40-minute documentary.
It’s totally unique, too. I shot Tim in front of a green screen with really disturbing imagery behind him, stuff like PETA footage… there was this one shot of this guy who’s going to kill all these chickens in a barn, and you don’t really know what you’re seeing, you just know that it’s really disturbing. I actually cut away right before he bludgeons this chicken, so it’s pretty fucked up. I’m totally going to hell, but…
JB: Might as well have some fun on your way there!
AR: Definitely! I actually have a director friend of mine who he had some footage of a throat surgery and I was like “Dude, let’s put some of that behind Tim!” We put it in and it was like an undulating vulva… it was a huge pink maw! (laughs) Ultimately Tim struck it, he said it was just too much. To hear Tim Sullivan say something is too much…
JB: You know it’s pretty fucked up!
Now, you mentioned the Superman Returns docs; I had noticed that you have your own video production company, Robitel Media Works. Tell me a bit about that…
AR: Well, right now I’m doing a sexual harassment training video, actually. While that doesn’t sound interesting…
JB: It’s about having a diverse body of work…
AR: Exactly. It all started because I went to film school. I realized that as an actor you’re completely helpless, so I wanted to learn how to produce and just be in control of the situation. I made a choice about three years ago that I just had to learn how to produce, how to edit; it came down to me teaching myself Final Cut Pro, learning stuff on line and taking tutorials, drinking coffee like it was water… and ultimately I produced a documentary about innovation for Exxon Mobil that won myself and a friend of mine all kinds of awards. It was really cool!
Editing is very similar to acting in a way; it’s very responsive. You respond to an image the same way you can respond to a line of dialogue; it’s sort of like a big Rubik’s Cube when it all comes together right.
That’s how I approached the Superman project, too. We had 27 of these to produce, one a week, and at times I would have up to 20 hours of footage. So I became a kind of ninja of finding a story, trying to do it in an unexpected way, but a way that still made sense in terms of story. It’s so easy to get bogged down with bigger, better, badder that you forget what the characters are doing.
So to answer your question, it started in film school, then I did the documentary, got into doing commercials, and that puts me here. Acting is fun, but I just really love doing the whole thing, and Tim’s in such a great position to be a steward of this whole process, too. I would much rather, 10 years from now, be producing really scary horror films and occasionally throwing myself in one than the other way around. I’m a lot more comfortable wearing a girl’s scalp on my head or wearing a kimono than I am playing the high school quarterback!
JB: How did you get the deal working on Superman Returns?
AR: One of the writers, Michael Dougherty, had worked together in the past and he sort of volleyed for me, then when Bryan (Singer) saw some of my work he said absolutely. The next thing I knew I was on a plane to Sydney, Australia!
As a bit of a side note, I’m now part of the Superman curse…
JB: Really? How’d you manage that bit of luck?
AR: Well, I’d been there for a few weeks, and one night I locked myself out of the place where I was staying. It was a self-locking compound, so when I went outside to walk the dog, I locked myself out. So I panicked and decided to punch my way through the window.
JB: Jesus…
AR: Yeah, it sliced my bicep, and when I lurched forward another piece came down and sliced my back, went inside and punctured my lung instantly. So it was pretty fucking severe! I was actually featured in a recent Premiere article that said I’m part of the Superman Curse.
The DVD producer got jumped, another member of the team’s skull got fractured when he fell down the stairs, and then my assistant’s sister was in a car crash and was in a coma…
JB: My God!
AR: Yeah, it was pretty bizarre. The same kind of stuff happened on Maniacs, too. The energy in that place was really creepy. There were all sorts of weird voices, shadows playing tricks on your mind… you know it got distilled through a lot of jokes and stuff, but I think the notion at the core of Maniacs, brother fighting brother, is still pretty horrific.
Did you know that more people at the Battle of Antietam, something like 100,000 soldiers, than in more recent wars? That was all pre-antiseptics and pre-anesthesia, there were massive piles of dead people. It was just an ugly, ugly war and I think it still resonates today in places like where we shot 2001 Maniacs.
JB: It sounds like it was definitely a unique setting for such a humor-based film.
So do you have anything else on the horizon you can talk about?
AR: Well, I have an investigative show that I’m trying to get setup somewhere right now. It’s sort of like a cross between X-Files and 60 Minutes, I guess. It’s a genuine investigative show with a younger spin. I’m also developing a few features and constantly writing, as well…
JB: Can you talk more about the investigation show? It sounds intriguing…
AR: Well, instead of a show like “Fear,” where you put kids in a supposedly haunted location, you’d actually try to find a real newsworthy story about, say, a psychic helping out a police department solve crimes. What we’d do is go in, stay with the psychic for a month until she either solved the crime or it all came up empty; you basically just follow the story and see where it goes naturally.
If there’s a tribe in Africa that are found eating people, we’d do an episode that has a profile of someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, then maybe have a segment that was anthropological dealing with what causes cannibalism to actually happen. The third act the, the payoff if you will, would be someone actually eating flesh on camera.
Everything leads to a guttural punch. There’s a story I read in Maxim, I believe, about a prison in Siam where these two American guys were interred for two years. They were just college students, partying and having a good time, and I think they ended up buying some hash or something and they got caught. So they were thrown in this horrible prison and the whole article was about their experience.
There was one story about them, when they heard a fellow prisoner screaming and wailing, and finally the guards came in a shined a flashlight in the guy’s face, and his neck was pulsating. So they brought him to the infirmary and sliced his neck open, and all these maggots came pouring out. Apparently something had managed to work its way into his throat lining and laid its eggs inside his neck….
Stuff like that, when you’re just like “what the fuck?” So we’d hear a story like that and maybe do a show on the worst prisons in the world or something.
JB: Now that sounds like the sort of show The Horror Channel would want to look at…
AR: Yeah, definitely, like I said I’m shopping it around all over now so it’s still pretty open.
We have another show we’re working on called “Reel Horror”, which would be all about the true stories behind the biggest horror films of all time. For example, A Nightmare on Elm Street came from an article Wes Craven had read on some kids in the Philippines who kept falling asleep and dying in their dreams. The Exorcist is based on a kid from Washington, I believe, and we’d dig into that backstory, maybe find the kid or the eye witnesses…
JB: That sounds like something else we could be behind…
AR: Definitely, we should chat more about it, see what we can do…
The conversation went on from there, and will hopefully continue forward soon, as well, but we’ll leave the interview at that for now. Needless to say Adam’s got some very cool stuff in the works and if someone with the right amount of guts gets behind it (hopefully it’ll be us!), we could be looking at some very original horror-themed programming.
Big thanks to Adam for taking the time to chat with me, and of couse to Tim Sullivan for allowing us to make the connection in the first place! 2001Maniacs is out on DVD March 28th, so be sure you click here to pre-order the disc. You can also see the trailer here and visit the official Maniacs site here. If you’re in or near L.A., be sure to hit Dark Delicacies on the day of the disc’s release to meet pretty much everyone involved with the film!
That’s a lotta links! We’ve got one more interview coming next week that I know you guys are going to love, so stick around!
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