Remember when a movie producer could ride on a smile and a shoeshine and ballyhoo was as American as apple pie? This was when William Castle – the last of the great American showmen – transformed watching schlock-horror B-movies into an event. Buzzing seats, flying skeletons and luminescent ghosts were just some of the bizarre gimmicks cinema-goers experienced during William Castle’s outlandish career as a producer, director and marketeer.
Filmmaker Jeffrey Schwartz chronicles Castle’s entrepreneurial drive for success and notoriety, charting the quintessential rags-to-riches tale of the man Variety called “the PT Barnum of the nuclear age”. —MIFF
Jeffrey Schwarz is President & CEO of Automat Pictures, a leading producer of studio EPKs (electronic press kit), Blu-ray and DVD content, original TV programming, and feature films. He has contributed to the success of dozens of major studio releases for directors such as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Sam Mendes, Wes Craven, Rob Reiner, Joe Dante, Barry Sonnenfeld, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter, Chris Columbus, and the Coen Brothers. Television productions include Starz’s “Sex and the Cinema,” “In the Gutter,” “Hitchcocked!” and “Shooting the Police: Cops on Film,” and IFC’s “Reservoir Dogs Revisited” and “Still Swingin’.” Automat Pictures provided exclusive backstage content for the 2010 Academy Awards produced by Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic. In 2008, Jeffrey premiered the GayVN award winning feature documentary “Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon,” a portrait of adult film star Jack Wrangler. It is distributed by TLA Releasing and had its television… read more
Great fun, fast paced profile. Really learned a lot about the guy beyond just being the "gimmick" filmmaker.