28 Things We Learned from the ‘Fade to Black’ Commentary
Looking for another reason to love your 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD collection? Special features like commentaries featuring filmmakers, critics, and other film fans. After living for more than a decade elsewhere on the internet, Commentary Commentary has been reborn here at Dread Central – and as is fitting for its return from the dead, it’s now all about the horror.
The horror genre is filled with movies about people who cross a line and become murderers. They’re not usually all that subtle or sensitive to the idea of mental health, especially horror films made in decades past, but the 1980 film Fade to Black is something of an exception.
Its focus is a young man who loves cinema and hates the people all around him. The movie doesn’t exonerate him of guilt, but it at least makes an effort at understanding what led him there. Of course, it’s also a fun, thrilling descent into movie-loving madness, and as this month is the film’s 45th anniversary, it seemed fitting that we dig in a little deeper.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Fade to Black (1980)
Commentators: Dennis Christopher (actor), Brad Henderson (moderator)
1. The film opens in Eric’s (Dennis Christopher) bedroom, and when he first walks in, the only posters on the walls were ones from producer Irwin Yablans. Christopher spent nearly a day sprucing it up with more varied images from magazines, New Beverly Theater calendars, and his personal collection.
2. The room is incredibly detailed, but it’s also incredibly chaotic. Christopher suggests that it’s supposed to represent the inside of Eric’s brain.
3. “I didn’t want to do this movie at first,” he says, adding that “I just couldn’t say no to it.” He had concerns about the dialogue, but he threw his heart and soul into helping shape the character once he signed on. (They also kept upping his offer, which helped him to say yes.) That led to some scenes being a bit improvised, especially ones between Eric and Marilyn (Linda Kerridge).
4. Christopher points out that while Eric is the villain, every other character had to “out-villain the villain.” It’s the other characters who constantly push Eric down to the point of breaking.
5. Christopher brought his own wardrobe to the production.
6. Tim Thomerson plays a social worker here, and it’s a reunion as he and Christopher previously worked together two years prior on Robert Altman’s A Wedding.
7. Christopher had a serious skiing accident prior to production, and he read this script while he was still in traction. He had to wear “a full plastic cast that bends at the knee and at the ankle,” and he wore it through parts of this film’s production. His discomfort is visible in several scenes.
8. “This is sort of the beginning of him loving his fantasy more than loving his reality,” he says when Eric first sees Marilyn in the diner. The fantasy sequence was supposed to include a whole imagined song and dance number ripped from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Producers cut the entire sequence, but Christopher “went to the mat” for it, leading to a compromise where Kerridge gets to play Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday to You.”
9. “I see them as normal in this scene, and I don’t see their demons,” says Christopher about the scene with Eric and Marilyn riding on his Vespa, smiling, talking, and free of worries. It’s a sweet moment showing “what they could be like if they hadn’t bought this Hollywood bait of worshipping these images and loving fantasy more than reality.”
10. There’s a wide shot at 23:02 of a small house on the beach—Christopher refers to it as a “crappy apartment”—and he says while it’s probably on the market for over a million dollars these days, at the time, you could live in a crappy little apartment on the beach in Malibu for $400 per month. Sad!
11. “They’re more powerful than we think,” he says regarding the images we consume in films and on television. He’s not sure the film drives the theme well enough, but he appreciates its effort.
12. The script made no mention of Eric actually imitating the voices of various film characters, but Christopher couldn’t resist anyway.
13. Filmmakers have to pay a fee to use images/sounds from other movies, but Christopher points out an interesting loophole. You don’t have to pay anything if you’re showing posters for films that are actually being marketed at the time of filming. “We could load it with movie images without having to pay the money for the licensing.”
14. Kerridge was attached to the film before Christopher, and she’s actually the one who recommended him to the producers. The pair were dating and even attended the Golden Globes when he was nominated for Breaking Away, “and the night before we started shooting, I broke up with her.” He thought it would help her trust him as an actor if they weren’t romantically involved.
15. “This here is the scene,” says Christopher when we get to Eric watching Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. “This is snap city right now.” The script originally called for Eric to push his mother’s wheelchair down the stairs, but he just wasn’t feeling that; it felt too neat. Instead, he fought to have Eric give the malfunctioning wheelchair just a little push and then let the chair’s motor take it the rest of the way. “He’s more alive than he’s ever felt in his life. The movie’s going through his head. He can’t fucking stand what’s going on. It’s just going there, man, and he feels he’s having an orgasm.”
16. The shot of the mother rolling down the stairs to her doom originally ended with her dead on the pavement below, but Christopher “had to ask them to pan up to me and keep the camera rolling.” They had no clue what he was going to do, but it’s clear he was right to insist here, as we see Eric fall completely into madness.
17. Henderson asks what Christopher learned from working with directors like Altman and Peter Yates, and he says that he saw them fighting for the things they believed in while making their movies. It’s a lesson well learned as he fought for Fade to Black to its benefit.
18. He had to fight for the shot at 42:55 with Eric painting half his face like Dracula, and he even called in a photographer friend of his to capture it just as he wanted it. “We shot it in my dressing room, and it became the poster for the movie.”
19. The scene where Eric chases the woman in red was shot while Christopher was still in the leg cast. So that’s a stand-in running after her with the Dracula cape swirling about.
20. The original script called for him to catch her, bite her neck, and kill her, but Christopher fought it. They instead settled for her tripping while running away from him and getting impaled in the neck with a fence post. “There was supposed to be an insert of a full moon and a dog howl,” he says. “They didn’t take that suggestion.”
21. Yablans cameos at 53:22 as a carnival vendor.
22. Mickey Rourke plays a bully who gets cornered by Eric at gunpoint, and Christopher recalls Rourke not being happy with how far he took the scene. “He really didn’t want to kneel down on the ground, though. He actually got furious with me.”
23. It was Christopher’s idea to get some b-roll footage of Eric on Hollywood Boulevard, but he worries it ended up foreshadowing too much.
24. The guy at 1:04:25 working the memorabilia shop is played by Larry Edmonds, “the biggest purveyor of all things cinema.” Christopher says fans and studios alike would turn to him for stills and merchandising for older films.
25. The script originally had Eric come home after a day out and dance around his room with a Marilyn Monroe cardboard cutout. Christopher called bull, saying the character would actually “be whacking off to the person he’s obsessed with.” So that’s what he does.
26. Christopher didn’t get to see the mummy costume before the day of shooting, and when he finally did, he was shocked to see it was trash. “It looked so ugly, the top of the head was a thing that just sat on you, and it looked like a tea cozy. It was not scary, it looked like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man made out of rags.” Yablans came down to the set and backed the actor’s disdain before sending out an assistant for tons of gauze and cotton, which they soaked in tea to darken. Then, Yablans himself wrapped it all around Christopher.
27. The script’s original ending took place in a photo studio where Eric had recreated the red bed from Marilyn Monroe’s infamous Playboy cover. Christopher nixed it—again—and suggested an ending set at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Part of it was because he felt Eric wouldn’t force Marilyn to strip for a photo, but he also felt that Eric’s fantasies were never about murder; they’re all about being in a movie.
28. They were given access to the famous theater, brought in extras, and filmed the ending in one night. It went fairly smoothly, although Christopher did get in trouble for banging on the theater’s big screen. “I’m trying to get into the movies. I’m trying to get into the screen.” You can see the damage he caused at 1:32:30.
Quotes Without Context
“I don’t even know if people know what a TV Guide was, but it’s a little book that came out weekly.”
“It’s got everything, this movie. It’s got cocaine, it’s got movie stars, it’s got cinemaphiles. It touches on all the zeitgeists of the time.”
“Ritz Crackers in bed!”
“I’m not afraid of horror movies, come on. I’m in It for god’s sake.”
“We’re trying to portray a person, not a murderer.”
“Remember my massive legs in Breaking Away?”
“I don’t think the people ever knew we were shooting the outside of their house.”
“It’s really kind of scary. Not from a ‘boo’ standpoint, but from a mental illness standpoint. And it’s very sexual at the same time.”
“It’s just a revenge movie now.”
“I’m not quite sure who I’m impersonating now.”
“I’d like somebody to count up the number of Quaaludes I give her and for someone to do a toxicology report.”
Fade to Black remains a lot of things. It’s a slick psychothriller, an unsettling tale of obsession, a sad and twisted story about unchecked mental illness, and a fun little horror movie with a real affection for cinema. The commentary track, available on Vinegar Syndrome’s terrific release from 2020, is equally abundant. Christopher has a lot to say about the film and his role in it, and he’s not shy about calling it as he sees it. He takes credit for numerous beats here that have gone on to become iconic moments in the movie, and his thought process is so clear and single-minded that it feels honest. He’s also having a good time reminiscing about the people and places he encountered while making the film—talents both living and dead, Los Angeles locales both still standing and long torn down. A great commentary track for a great film.
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