Annual fright night brings a creep show
Chillin' with the stars
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Many of the celebrities charged $20 for autographed stills, or $25 to take their photos or be included in one. Blair was raising money for her own charity, The Linda Blair World Heart Foundation as was a dapper Richard Dreyfuss. He was raising money for The Dreyfuss Initiative, designed to encourage the teaching of civics in American classrooms. Peter Fonda was there to sell stills of Easy Rider and talk about his new motorcycle film.
“It has nothing to do with Easy Rider,” Fonda said to one reporter, emphasizing the point by snapping on his handy pair of sunglasses, in his suave Peter Fonda way.
Even Mickey Rooney and Ann Margaret had showed up on Halloween to shake hands and schmooze an audience dressed as vampires, monsters, harlots, werewolves and other people wearing normal New Jersey clothes.
But the real guest of honor at this event was John Zachereley, The Cool Ghoul. If you don’t remember, he was the original host of Chiller Theatre, which aired starting in 1957 on Monday and Tuesday nights. The show featured black and white horror B-films and of course Zachereley, an elfish man with the stature of an undertaker who would be spliced into certain scenes as if he belonged in the originals. Chiller Theatre proved to be so popular and it was on so late on school nights it had to be moved to Fridays and Saturdays on WPIX where Zachereley stayed until 1965. The real miracle about this cool ghoul is that he’s almost 92 years of age and has lived in the same rent-controlled building in Manhattan for so long the rent is probably less than a ticket to the Expo.
Sara Karloff, the handsome daughter of Boris Karloff, greeted her father’s multigenerational fans with his legacy, talking about how he made 80 films before his career took off with Frankenstein. Although he’s been gone for more than 40 years, his films pass from generation to generation, from the original to television and cable, and now to DVDs.
“Some of his favorites were The Body Snatchers, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam all made by the film producer Val Lewton,” Karloff said. “He was also very proud to be one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild. His card was #9 and he worked up until the day he died.”
Jon Provost, who we all know as Timmy Martin on the Lassie show, beginning in 1957, worked with three different dogs, from the time he was 7 until he was 14 years old. But the dog he liked the best, the third Lassie, he worked with for five years.
“I got into show business at the age of two because my mother was a Jane Wyman fan,” Provost said, sitting alongside a stack of Lassie books and photos from the show. “We answered a casting call to be in a film with (Wyman) and I was also in The Country Girl with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly when I was four years old.”
Along with Barbara Feldman, Ali McGraw, and the Man From Uncle’s Stefanie Powers, all svelte and a little more mature than the young girls we remember, was a glowing Dawn Wells (Mary Ann), straight from Gilligan’s Island and no less perky. She looks much younger than her 71 years and eagerly greeted her fans, who she said she helped raise well with her wholesome show.
The three year series (1964-1967) "has never been off the air and has been broadcast around the world including the Middle East,” Wells said. “It’s kind of like the Mickey Mouse Club . . . timeless, no cars, no clothes to date it and enough slapstick to transcend any language.”
In addition to all the movie stars, you could buy armloads of posters, stills, Star Trek costumes, King Kong models, Dick Tracy comics, KISS dolls and enough memorabilia to fill thousands of basements and attics.
Navigation
