One-sheet for Death Machines (1976). Artist unknown.
Movie-lovers!
Welcome back to The Deuce Notebook, a collaboration between MUBI's Notebook and The Deuce Film Series, our monthly event at Nitehawk Williamsburg that excavates the facts and fantasies of cinema's most infamous block in the world: 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. For each screening, my co-hosts and I pick a title that we think embodies the era of 24-hour theater hopping, and present the venue at which it premiered…
Our friend and guest collaborator Chris Poggiali (of Temple of Schlock fame) takes the helm once again; last July, he contributed to our column with an incredible piece about Japanese samurai films and their entry into the US mainstream. This month, Chris introduces us to the world of director Paul Kyriazi.
Chris is an authority on genre films and we’re excited to promote his recent book, co-written by Grady Hendrix, entitled These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World—check it out!!
Michael Chong and Joshua Johnson are prepared to get "a head" in Death Machines (1976).
Back in 2019, Grady Hendrix and I began working on the book that would become These Fists Break Bricks (published earlier this year) by poring over issues of the martial arts magazines I had amassed over the years. Among the myriad articles that caught our attention were two that appeared in Fighting Stars, a long-defunct magazine dedicated to “celebrities in the art of self-defense”: the first, dated August 1978, was an interview with martial artist Eric Lee about a movie he had starred in the previous year called The Last Adventure, and the second was nestled inside the August 1981 issue and concerned karate instructor Sid Campbell, several players from the Oakland Raiders, and a movie they were all involved in called The Eagle Claw. It quickly became apparent to us that The Last Adventure was the working title for Weapons of Death (1981), and The Eagle Claw was the movie that eventually became Ninja Busters (completed in 1984, and pretty much unreleased until 2018). These two articles raised a number of questions, and since Paul Kyriazi was the director of both Weapons of Death and Ninja Busters, I reached out to him for the answers.
A few weeks later, Paul called me from his home in Japan and we spent several hours discussing not only Weapons of Death and Ninja Busters but the other movies he's made—including his latest, Forbidden Power (2018)—as well as the books he has written and the star-studded audio dramas he has penned and produced. I'd been a fan of Paul's films long before I approached him to be interviewed for These Fists Break Bricks, so I was disappointed when not one word of our conversation survived the book's long and brutal editing process. That said, I'm happy Grady and I were able to properly credit Paul with making the first narrative martial arts movies produced in the United States.
What follows is just a portion of our conversation from that day (December 22, 2019), most of it pertaining to Paul’s short films and the two features that played theaters across the United States, including the grindhouses of 42nd Street: Death Machines and Weapons of Death. Enjoy!
Bella Union theater operator Frank Lee became the first distributor of Shaw Brothers movies in the continental US when he premiered The Last Woman of Shang at another of his theaters—the 55th Street Playhouse in New York—in December 1964. In the above ad from December 1967, he appears to be confusing Wang Yu’s one-armed swordsman from Hong Kong with the one-eyed, one-armed Japanese swordsman Tange Sazen, portrayed by Kinnosuke Nakamura in a Hideo Gosha film the previous year.
NOTEBOOK: You started making films in San Francisco during a time when there were so many great movie theaters in the Bay Area, like the St. Francis on Market Street and the Bella Union in Chinatown…
PAUL KYRIAZI: We also had the Great Star Chinese Theater that’s been there since 1930. That was in Chinatown and they showed all those Shaw Brothers sword-fight movies. I loved those, all those clanging swords—Bang! Bang! Bang! The Toho showed samurai movies, and twice a year they’d bring back Sword of Doom and separately they’d bring back Three Outlaw Samurai. Those were always sold out. Downtown at Market Street they had revivals of American movies. The audiences on Market Street were terrific because they were there to be entertained and they really got into the movies. Near the UC Berkeley campus there was a big theater that changed [films] every day. They had a calendar with double bills every day of classic movies. When video came around in 1980, these theaters all slowly started to close.
Hideo Gosha’s Three Outlaw Samurai plays the Toho Rio (February, 1966).
NOTEBOOK: On the audio commentary for Death Machines you refer to the Shaw Brothers movie Triple Irons (the U.S. release version of The New One-Armed Swordsman) as being an influence on the way you shot the opening fight on the bridge. When did you start watching martial arts movies?
KYRIAZI: When I was in college [at San Francisco State]. I got into karate at the time, and my teacher said, “You’ve got to see these samurai movies!” so I started going to the Japanese samurai movies and the Chinese sword fighting movies. My 16mm movies had karate in them years before Kung Fu. A guy I know went back a couple of years later and the head of the film department said, “Is your friend Kyriazi still making those karate movies?”—and that was two years before The 5 Fingers of Death and Enter the Dragon happened, he asked “Is Kyriazi still—?” [Bursts out laughing.] They didn’t know what I was doing, making karate movies! I was in college [from] 1965 to ’69 and Enter the Dragon was ’73. I was making them before anybody just because I was into karate and was seeing the movies.
Combat 6 is the Taiwanese swordplay film Wu Lin Liu Jie (1970), aka Six Intellectuals (July, 1969).
NOTEBOOK: What were some of the 16mm films you made during this time?
KYRIAZI: One was called Trapped. It was color, 30 minutes long. Three guys get involved with some guy from India. We shot up in the hills with these guys with turbans and masks. We were trying to take this foreign exchange guy to safety through the hills and all these killers were chasing us. That won the Berkeley Film Festival.
NOTEBOOK: You were making action movies at a time when most student films probably leaned toward the avant-garde.
KYRIAZI: What one of my film teachers called “goddamn hippie movies”—there was no story to them. They were all acid delusional and freak-out movies, or short five-minute movies with a musical soundtrack, a Beatles song or something. I shot a 30-minute story, so that won the Berkeley Film Festival. My second movie was Blade of Doom and it was kind of a copy of Sword of Doom, the classic samurai movie. I loved samurai movies. I changed the samurai to street thugs like West Side Story with knives instead of swords. That was seventeen minutes and it won the next year.
The Sword of Doom’s (1966) first run at the Toho Rio (September, 1966).
NOTEBOOK: How many of these 16mm films did you make?
KYRIAZI: Three. The third one was 20 minutes and also based on a samurai movie. That was The Tournament. I used my karate school. My teacher was a young German guy and I used him as the hero. They’re having a tournament and the hero’s not allowed to enter the tournament so he steals the black belt certificate off of the court wall to disgrace the karate instructor and he brings all of his men to fight. That’s based on Three Outlaw Samurai, where the farmers kidnap the daughter of the mayor of the town. We didn’t have a girl so we used the stealing of the certificate.
NOTEBOOK: Wait—you said this was The Tournament?
KYRIAZI: Yes, but then I made the longer movie of The Tournament where we actually did kidnap the girl. [Laughs.]
Poster for The Tournament (1972).
NOTEBOOK: OK, so that’s the one on the Ninja Busters Blu-ray. I was going to say, I remembered that being a period samurai story...
KYRIAZI: Set in England—a mistake. The three 16mm films were modern day karate-action-sword movies with killers from India or wherever they came from to justify the swords—but when I made The Tournament, I tried to do a real samurai movie with period costumes. We had fake sword props from Toho! One of my buddies in the Air Force went to Japan and he had a contact at Toho, so we got three kimonos from Toho Studios. One was worn by Tatsuya Nakadai, who starred in Sword of Doom. Then we had to have those knight costumes and one horse, and it all had to take place in the forest. I should’ve done it modern-day like Weapons of Death, which I did eventually—and in color!
Angela (Nancy Lee) and her captors in Kyriazi's Weapons of Death (1981).
NOTEBOOK: Were there plans to shoot The Tournament in color?
KYRIAZI: Yes, we did start off in color but we got too big and ran out of money. I never even developed the color footage. A year later I decided to shoot it in black-and-white, just me and a cameraman and an assistant. We had these reflectors that we rented that were very light—one guy could carry two of them—and we went into the Berkeley hills where that bridge was and filmed it.
NOTEBOOK: Not only in black and white, but in a widescreen format.
Newspaper advertisement for four screenings of The Tournament at the Gemini Cinema in Lompoc, California in September 1973.
KYRIAZI: I always wanted to use ’Scope because when you’re doing a low-budget movie that makes it look a little more expensive. At that time a lot of big movies were being shot in Techniscope, including the Clint Eastwood Italian Westerns. Techniscope was a Technicolor process only, and it pulled down instead of four frames where you get a square 35mm shot, it pulled down two frames, cut in half, giving you a ’Scope 2.35:1 ratio automatically and it uses half of the film because you’re shooting half frames. They take that half frame and squeeze it down in the lab, optically, and then blow it up to full frame 35 so what you end up with is a 35mm print squeezed just as if you had shot in Panavision, but it is Techniscope. So you save money and you get ’Scope. Well… [Laughs.]
NOTEBOOK: What happened?
KYRIAZI: I called Technicolor and asked, “Can you do Techniscope black-and-white?” and the guy said, “Sure!” So I started filming and then Technicolor called me when I sent the first stuff down and said, “We can’t do this! There’s no such thing!” I said, “But Techniscope is a Technicolor process.” The guy said, “Have you shot much?” I said, “Yeah.” I told him the name of the guy at Technicolor who said they could do it in black-and-white, and he said, “He’s one of our salesmen. He doesn’t know all of the technical stuff. OK, we’ll figure out how to do it.” So they figured out a different process and had to make an intermediate print, and I didn’t save much money on it after all.
Article about The Tournament from The Lompoc Record (January 30, 1973).
NOTEBOOK: The version on the Ninja Busters disc runs 48 minutes. Was that always the running time?
KYRIAZI: It was 60 minutes, or 58 minutes, which was still not feature-length. When I realized we had a short film, the editor and I stretched out the scenes and let them go long. [Laughs.] I think the first cut was 63 minutes, and then we had a bunch of screenings. I even had the guts to show it to the Toho executives in Los Angeles in the Toho Theatre… [Laughs.] …and they didn’t want it. Then I got tired of it having those long scenes, so I just went in and cut the print that I had, at my buddy’s house, with a splicer. Then I made a three-quarter-inch copy of it. So it was 63 minutes, and I thought I had cut five minutes out but I think it must’ve been fifteen, hence the 48 minutes. All that was lost were longer shots holding on people looking, the girl walking through the forest before they get to the bridge fight—all the walking around footage, I cut a lot of that out. We couldn’t sell it. I showed it to a guy who bought movies for the Philippines and he said, “Why didn’t you make this in color?! I could’ve sold it to the Philippines!”
Article about The Tournament from the Contra Costa Times (March 29, 1973).
NOTEBOOK: I read in a newspaper article that you did make a deal with a non-theatrical distributor called Threshold Films.
KYRIAZI: They converted it to 16mm squeezed for the college circuit and put it in a pamphlet that they had for college movies. I paid for half of it. I was just paying and paying. I was out of the Air Force by then so I was working at Dow Chemical for six months. They gave me the brochure or the booklet, and I saw they were charging $225 for a college to screen the movie, where at the time you could rent mainstream features on 16mm—which I did—for 30 bucks! I remember I rented Jason and the Argonauts to show to some people at a party, and an Elvis movie, and they were 30 bucks. I was surprised—225 bucks?! So then Jay Lovins, the guy at Threshold Films, said he got a complaint from the university that the movie wasn’t worth $225—which I agreed with—and they stopped renting it. So that was it. They had one rental. Jay was a nice guy and he did believe in the movie. I just don’t know why they charged $225, when you could get Spartacus for 30 bucks on 16mm. I knew it wasn’t that entertaining.
Article about The Tournament from The Lompoc Record (September 20, 1973).
Article about The Tournament from the Santa Maria Times (September 21, 1973).
NOTEBOOK: Where’s the music from?
KYRIAZI: That was canned music. The guys who were editing that with me—two other Air Force guys—they just got the canned music and we edited in drumbeats and things like that. It’s the main theme from Kronos, that giant robot walking machine that sucks up the electricity? Remember that, with Jeff Morrow? That’s the music I use over the step-printed fight scene at the beginning. Weapons of Death is canned music also.
NOTEBOOK: I was going to ask you about that. I like that main theme that plays over the closing credits.
KYRIAZI: I went to Hollywood and found some canned music, and then someone recommended a Hollywood music editor. I didn’t have the confidence to do it myself, so he said, “I’ll do it,” and he charged us whatever he charged us, and it was fantastic.
A trade paper advertisement for Death Machines.
NOTEBOOK: How did Death Machines come about?
KYRIAZI: I got out of the Air Force and worked at Dow Chemical seven days a week to pay off the debts on [The Tournament], and about a year later I was screening the film, trying to sell it, trying to get investors for my next film, when I ran into a karate guy who saw it and then introduced me to [martial artist] Ron Marchini. Ron saw the 16mm karate movies I made in college and then he saw The Tournament and said, “I see progress.” He told me “I’ve been looking for you for two years!” I said “I’ve been looking for you for three years!” [Laughs.]
NOTEBOOK: That's how you got involved with his movie Murder in the Orient?
KYRIAZI: Ron said, “I’ve got this movie, Manila Gold, and I want to see if I can fix it up.” So I watched it and he paid me for three days, which was wonderful—my first paid thing after the Air Force. I rented a little moviola room in San Francisco and I just cut the negative. It was 100 minutes and I cut it to 90. There was a lot of dead wood. He said, “If you have any free time, I’ll pay you to take it down to L.A. and try to sell it.” So I drove down with the cans of film and showed it to a couple of places, like Crown International. Crown didn’t like it—[company president] Mark Tenser said, “You better cut it down to 80 minutes.” I called Ron and he said, “Go ahead.” So I got a room, and in one day, I cut the print down to 80. I saw an ad for World Wide Films in Variety, and I screened it for them, and they wanted it—Chuck and Shelly [World Wide Films president Charles L. Hamilton and vice president Shelly Haimes]. Ron came down and sealed the deal. Driving back, Ron said, “How about we do another movie?” So we wrote up Death Machines.
NOTEBOOK: Getting back to Manila Gold for a minute…
KYRIAZI: Chuck and Shelly changed the title to Murder in the Orient. I thought that was all right, but then Ron and I said, “We’d like to help design the campaign.” Chuck said, “Oh no, we pride ourselves on the poster!” [Laughs.] I don’t know if you’ve seen the poster, but it was this almost black-and-white, one color or something weird...
NOTEBOOK: The one I have is in blue ink.
KYRIAZI: Oh yeah, they pride themselves.
Left: Murder in the Orient—San Francisco opening (December 25, 1975). Right: Murder in the Orient one-sheet, author's collection.
KYRIAZI: But you do get little bonuses sometimes. I was with my girlfriend, we were in the area of Market Street and I said, “Hey, let’s go down to the Strand and the Embassy and see what they’re showing.” They were old theaters that changed programs every couple of days—I wanted to see what they were showing. So we went, and there was Murder in the Orient. I said, “Oh my God, that’s Manila Gold, the movie I cut for Ron!” She said, “You knew it was here! You just want to show off!” [Laughs.]
One time I went to the Strand to see The Yakuza with a couple of guys I knew. We were waiting for it to start and the manager, this young guy—God, he must’ve been 22 years old—we started talking and he said, “Hey, have you guys ever heard of a movie called Death Machines?” I said, “Yeah, I directed it!” He didn’t believe me so I pulled out my card—it has “Weapons of Death, Director” on it—and he still didn’t believe me.
NOTEBOOK: I guess he hadn't seen Weapons of Death, or he would have recognized you from that!
KYRIAZI: Well, I'll tell you... I married a flight attendant. She was on a flight and got into San Francisco. One of the stewardesses said, “Hey, I heard you got married! Do you have a picture of your husband?” My wife pulled out my picture and the stewardess—who I didn’t know—said “I know that guy! I take my kids to all of the martial arts movies! He’s in Weapons of Death!” So sometimes you don’t make money, but… [Laughs.] What are the chances? My new wife pulls out my photo and heard, “I know that guy! He’s a movie star!” So those are the nice little perks when you don’t get your money back.
The heroes of Weapons of Death (left to right): Paul Kyriazi, Eric Lee, Garrick Huey, Joshua Johnson.
NOTEBOOK: I really like that stunt Ron Marchini does in Death Machines where he jumps onto the roof of the moving police car that you’re driving, then rolls off, does a spin kick that incapacitates you, and gets into the car in one shot.
KYRIAZI: I believe that’s two shots.
NOTEBOOK: Right, the jump and land is the first shot, and then from a different angle he rolls off, spins and kicks you through the open driver’s side window. Two shots or one, it’s impressive enough to make it into the trailer!
KYRIAZI: We rehearsed it once, without him kicking me hard. He did the spin and kick. He did that smoothly. I remember he had rubber soles, thank God. We set it up for the camera. I said, “Do it like this.” “OK.” It was one take. He spun and kicked me. For the whole movie—God, even on Omega Cop, years later—I had to keep telling him, “A miss is better than a hit! It’s more realistic!” He’d be hitting guys, and he hit me. It looked good though. I put my hand up because I think my sunglasses flew off.
NOTEBOOK: And then you drove the car that he rams a few seconds later.
KYRIAZI: I wasn’t going to ask anyone else to do it, so I drove that car. They strapped me in with ropes, so if that car had caught fire… [Laughs.] On the first take I zoomed by too fast and he wasn’t able to hit me. On the next take he hit me, and oh man, that was a shock! We wanted another take where he hit it harder and moved it, so we did one where I was just sitting there and Ron ran the car right into me and the car slid. So he hit me twice on that—two takes, and we cut them together to make it look like the car slid a little bit more.
Death Machines: (1) the director gets kicked by the producer, (2) first fender bender, (3) second fender bender.
NOTEBOOK: On the audio commentary, you said that after The Tournament, you made a pledge that if you ever got a chance to do another movie, you’d put everything into it to make up a great poster—bikers, gangsters, scantily-clad women, kung fu, blaxploitation—but Crown used none of those elements in the poster design and went with the “killers of the future” pyramid image instead.
KYRIAZI: So the science-fiction people who went were disappointed it wasn’t science fiction, and the martial arts people didn’t go because they thought it was science fiction. When Crown opened it in 50 theaters in southern California, they added those boxes with “The Oriental Death Machine,” “The Black Death Machine,” and “The White Death Machine” next to the pyramid, so they knew they’d made a mistake.
NOTEBOOK: It opened first in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana…
KYRIAZI: And the theaters were complaining. I think it was still the number-twelve grosser in America the first week.
Advertisements for Death Machines in New York (at left) and Los Angeles (at right), both 1976, with an altered campaign for the latter. When the film opened in the New York City area on July 16, the second feature at the 42nd Street New Amsterdam and other action theaters was the Glenn Ford Western Santee (a 1973 Crown International release).
NOTEBOOK: Ron Marchini was also the producer, right?
KYRIAZI: Yeah, but Ron didn't get any money from Crown International. They have a deal, 50/50, but the producer pays the expenses. If the movie makes a dollar, Crown International takes 50 cents and then charges the producer 50 cents of expenses, so they keep the whole dollar. What they do is, they make one phone call to New York for a dollar and they charge all ten movies they released that year that dollar. They make money on all of the movies. Ten times the expenses. On paper you don’t get any money back. That’s not just Crown, that’s everybody. Out of every dollar they take 50 cents, and then send you 50-cents’ worth of receipts for expenses including dinners.
Left: Rare alternate ad sheet for Death Machines (author’s collection). Right: Trade ad for Crown International's releases of 1976.
NOTEBOOK: When did Weapons of Death go into production?
KYRIAZI: October 1977. I was raising money while we shot, Michael Todd-style—on Around the World in 80 Days, he was raising money as he was filming. I started with $30,000 and figured, well, when we’re shooting people will know it’s real and put money into it. They came to the set, visited, put money into it. We finished and I was making a thousand a month off the budget, which was great at that time. I edited in my apartment and was happy as hell. I was editing the bar fight scene at the beginning, which I based on the beginning of Rio Bravo, and right when I was editing that, the FM radio announcer said the director Howard Hawks had just died. I said, “Thanks for the bar scene, Howard!”
NOTEBOOK: You’re also one of the leads in the movie, but your character fights with a gun during the action scenes. Was that because, as the director, you didn’t have time for sword fighting or hand-to-hand combat choreography?
KYRIAZI: No, it was my idea—one guy brings a gun. I took karate but I’d look ridiculous doing it next to Eric Lee and all those other guys. Besides, I didn’t like movies where every guy knew karate. Inevitably, someone in the audience would yell, “Why didn’t they bring a gun?!” I have the line, “I have an equalizer—it’s the only one I could come up with on short notice.” I was holding the gun belt in my left hand like Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks. I wanted to be Marlon Brando. And you saw me reloading after six shots. People were screaming in the theaters during that gun stuff, and the biggest scream was when I jumped up in the air off the little cliff, shot some guys, landed on my back, spun, and shot another guy. Where did I get that choreography? I don’t know—maybe from Japanese gangster movies. I didn’t want to take the time to get the reaction shot of the guy getting hit so I shot three or four guys at the same time.
NOTEBOOK: I like it when you run across the bridge on the railing.
KYRIAZI: The railing that was about six inches in diameter! I learned that from Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood where he slid down this folded curtain which is like three floors high. He had one leg over the fold in the curtain and he slid down. It turns out he had a slide, like a children’s slide, hidden behind the curtain. He put his butt on the slide, way up in the air—it’s a long shot—and one leg on the curtain fold and he slid down the curtain. What I did was put a two-by-six board on the other side of the railing, which you couldn’t see, and that gave me more room to jump up and balance. It still took some doing! I made sure that if I fell, I’d fall on the bridge side. It was a wide shot and you can see the rocks ten feet below. The audience went “Whoaaa!” A little girl who was a friend of [actor and stunt coordinator] Gerald Okamura came up to me after one of the screenings and said “You don’t do that next time! You could’ve fallen down and hit those rocks!” [Laughs.]
Left: Opening day ad for Weapons of Death in the New York area (August 7, 1981). The second feature at the 42nd Street Lyric was Antonio Margheriti's The Squeeze, starring Lee Van Cleef and Karen Black. Right: Advertisement for Weapons of Death in Miami.
NOTEBOOK: The movie didn’t get released until 1981, three and a half years after it was filmed.
KYRIAZI: The editing took so long—I was doing it myself on rewinds, and you’ve got to cut picture and soundtrack. You make one cut and it’s four splices so it took time. It also took a while to get the postproduction money. We were able to mix it at Fantasy Films in Berkeley, Saul Zaentz’s studio. It was state-of-the-art there—225 bucks an hour.
NOTEBOOK: I’m sure finding a distributor was the usual headache.
KYRIAZI: “Can you screen it for us? We’ll buy it for a million bucks.” This guy had a limousine and was rich, and then when we set up the screening, “Oh, good thing you called us today because we forgot about the screening!” Even though we had set it up the week before—“Good thing you called us!” And then he said “Is Gini Lau here today?” He didn’t want to buy the movie, he just wanted to watch it and hopefully the girls would show up.
NOTEBOOK: Whose idea was it to change the title from The Last Adventure to Weapons of Death?
KYRIAZI: The distributor’s. At first I didn’t like it, but then I thought ‘Wait a minute—Weapons of Death…Sword of Doom...” There you go! They copied the Enter the Dragon poster, so at least it looked like what it was supposed to be, but I was disappointed because I’d gone to the great trouble of filming in Chinatown and on the Golden Gate Bridge, to make it look American and contemporary and that poster made it look like a Chinese import.
The one-sheet for Weapons of Death, with artwork by Terry Lamb (author’s collection).
NOTEBOOK: That’s true. I didn’t know it was an American movie until a decade after it came out, when I found a used VHS in a record store bargain bin.
KYRIAZI: It did well. When it was in Georgia there was a heatwave, and everybody went to the movies to get out of the heat, and it was a big hit. It broke a house record in New York. It was the lead movie, but it was playing with a rerun of one of the James Bond movies. It broke a house record in San Francisco also, playing with a Chinese movie. I went there [for] every screening. A lot of the actors went—we were signing autographs. The manager said “I’ve never seen anything like this! Usually every movie makes $4,000”—and he showed me, written on the books, that he had made $6,500. That was because I had promoted it on my own.
NOTEBOOK: How did you do that?
KYRIAZI: I made postcards of the poster with all of the information, like what theaters in San Francisco were playing it. I went through the phone book, and there were 125 karate schools around San Francisco, so I bought stamps and hand wrote 125 postcards to the karate schools, and that’s why it broke the house record. Of course, I was there with the actors and word got out, so people came back multiple times to see it and see us. Then it went to Chicago, and I even looked this up in the almanac years later—it was the coldest snowstorm in the history of Chicago or something like that. A guy I knew later said, “I was there during that time! I walked out of the house to go to school and my eyelashes froze to each other. I turned around and went back into the house.” So the distributor was making money moving it around, and then he got burned in that snowstorm and the movie died in Chicago.
NOTEBOOK: It must’ve done well on video.
KYRIAZI: I never got any money. We told the distributors, “Don’t sell to video yet!” It was 1980 and video was just starting. We said, “Don’t sell the rights,” and they said, “Yeah, we’re going to sell it.” We got a deal for $40,000 and wanted 50/50, but they said, “No, we’ll give you 30 percent.” OK, that's $12,000. We called them up and said, “Where’s our money from the video sale?” “Oh, our man was robbed at the airport.” They didn’t even try to make an excuse. Nobody gets robbed at the airport! They didn’t even try, because they know you can’t sue them if you don’t have the money. So after a while you just stop calling.
For those of you interested in learning more about the films of Paul Kyriazi, I highly recommend the three audio commentaries Paul has recorded to date: Ninja Busters (on Blu-ray from Garagehouse Pictures) and two recorded for his 1976 film Death Machines, one on DVD from Code Red and the other (with moderator Joe Rubin) on Blu-ray/DVD from Vinegar Syndrome.
—Interview conducted and edited by Chris Poggiali
Paul Kyriazi in Japan introducing the Vinegar Syndrome release of Death Machines.
The Deuce Film Series is a monthly, 35mm presentation created by "Joe Zieg" Berger and co-hosted with "Tour Guide Andy" McCarthy and 'Maestro Jeff’ Cashvan. Produced by Max Cavanaugh for Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg, The Deuce was founded in November 2012.