Gator Script Market Place US-Scripts

Here you will find some scripts we wrote many years ago and we never used so far. As I am now old and will retire there is no way that I will produce or direct those. I upload here some of the scripts I think a pretty good so if you are interessted in buying or producing just contact me at

MichaelMHuck@aol.com

The Black Candles  Episode 1

The Beauties and The Beast

Main Characters:

Ava Barclay:

Ava is a 341 year old witch-vampire. Beautiful, charming, intelligent and extremely dangerous. She loves luxury and treats men very mean. The only two men she really cares for are Maurice, the vampire who once saved her from being burned as a witch andf the young priest Charles who fell in love with her and became a vampire himself so he can stay close to her. Ava is the CEO of a Beauty Conglomerate and she sells eternal youth and beauty to rich woman, that is, acutally she is turning them into vampires...

Susanna Boyer:

Susanna is a very attractive wokman in her early 30s and that is what makes her feel extremely uncomfortable. She is a singer, but has not really a career, so she works part time as a secretary for her boyfriend Stanley Hardy, a private eye. When Hardy is investigating a case Susanna meets Ava Barclay and is fascinated, especially when she discovers Ava is a vampire. Susanna is thinking seriously about becoming herself a vampire so she can keep her youth and beauty.

Charles is a young priest who helps the poor and takes care of everyone. He desperately fell in love with Ava and became a vampire so he can stay close to her. Ava really likes him, showing this by treating him not quite as bad as she does with other men. But actually Ava is not to wild about Charles who is such a good person that even becoming a vampire did not stop him from being a good and kind person.

Mauricio is a 999 year old vampire. Handsome, debonaire, charming but even more dangerous than Ava. He is a kind of mixture of Maurice Chevalier, Cary Grant and Peter Cushing. Mauricios power and charmes are so unique even the vampire-hunting nuns of the catholic Judith-Order do not fight him, because they really started to like him.

Ava´s black cat Maurice: 

(the cat has to be re-named. So it is not "Satan" but the name is "Maurice")

Maurice is a Avas cat and he can do strange things like walking upside down on the ceiling like a fly. He can also sing.

And here is the first script:

And here the script Episode 2:

Hola Gringos! Viva la Revolucion!

The Mr. Gator Comic-Book

Our Mr. Gator Logo - of course - has a back-story. This is not only a logo Mr. Al Gator is a character himself and together with Isabel who did the drawings we wrote a back-ground story about Mr. Gator. 

And here we are somewhere beyond the sea: in America des Sur. In a small country where the horrible dictator Esteban rules. Saturno, the good philosopher fights with love and wisdom against the evil dictator and the soldiers of Esteban someday arrest Saturno and throw him into the Alligator Swamps, sure he soon will be killed by the gators.

Saturno finds an egg and a new born baby gator. Saturno adopts the little fellow who is named Al Gator. Saturno teaches him how to talk and all kind of philosophy and politics and when Mr. Gator has grown up they start a revolution and take over the country and they now set up their own country: Gatoria!

The Gator Story

    Hi, I am Michael !

                   Bonjour, je suis Michael !

        Hallo, ich bin Michael !

Hola, soy Miguelito y soy un hombre lobo !  

Michael Huck (will soon retire; meet me next to the Bermuda Triangle!)

Before:

And here I am; Michael Huck some decades ago when shototing the first Gator Group productions in Germany, Los Angeles, Paris and elsewhere and here today in my mid-60s, now about to retire:

After:

Shooting The Terror Stalkers 

Dina Babajic and Holger Delfs in The Terror Stalkers

Born 1961, I grew up in Germany watching all those wonderful US-Movies and TV Series. As there was no childrens televison yet, in the afternoon and on weekends there were a lot of US-series like "I dream of Jeannie" starring Barbara Eden, "The Detectives" with Robert Taylor and Bonanza and with all those wonderful movies directed and/or produced by Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Rouben Mamulian, Terence Fisher, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and of course: Howard Hawks. And many, many more. 

I fell in love with especially the US and Hollywood productions and even as a child I dreamed of going to Hollywood. As there were no computers and no internet the only way to watch movies was German television and sometimes I found in a library or bookstore some rare books on Hollywood or my favorite actors and directors. I collected tv magazines and I learned to keep in mind the names of actors, producers and directors, because I realized fast if you watch a hilarious movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch or Hawks it is almost sure that another movie by them will be a good one too. I also became a fan of many actors and actresses, some of my favorites are Jamers Stewart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Adolphe Menjou, Maurice Chevalier, Lee Grant, Karin Dor and Linda Stirling. I especially loved comedies, mostly US movies but also some German ones, especially the wonderful movies of Curt Goetz and some of Heinz Rühmanns movies like Die Feuerzangenbowle oder Der Florentinerhut. One day I watched an MGM musical entitled "It´s always fair weather" starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. The roller skates number just blew me away and musicals and I became very interested in musicals watching all the classigs like "Singin in the Rain", "Gigi" and "Walking my Baby back home". I became very interested in music and bought vinyls of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet. I also loved the never movies, especially "Viva Las Vegas" with Presley and Ann-Magret and I think I watched the first Nena movie at least five times when it opened in Germany and around this time there was also "Xanadu" with Gene Kelly in the theaters.

I started writing while still in school, mostly comedies, and when I was 17 or 18 there was a televison contest for young writers and my script had been one of around a dozen that had been accepted. The Title of my script was "Eine Kerze für Kaiser Wilhelm". It was a screwball comedy, Howard Hawks-style. Frank Strecker a then well-known German actor and director directed it and I was lucky to be prestent during shooting. Strecker had been a big fan of Howard Hawks too, so we got along quite well. Shortly after I got a letter from a television company in Cologne and they invited me to Cologne and introduced me to some television people of the WDR, a Cologne based tv station and they hired me for writing stories and as a gag writer.

Actually I also had another job, not that I really wanted that job; the German government made me soldier as in the early 1980s war with Russia was close (nothing changed so far it seems) and when you were over 18, you got a letter from the army requesting to go to see them and join.

So I came to Marburg/Lahn and became a soldier in the Tannenbergkaserne. In Marburg, by the way, is the grave of Hindenburg. I was not really interessted in that soldier thing, I got a drivers license for trucks and I loved to drive Mercedes trucks but didn´t like the other ones. I also became part of the ABC-Abwehr, which is Atomic-Biological-Chemical warfare and defense and they made us do some very dangerous things and I still wonder that we alls survived that training unhurt and as I said, what we did was really dangerous. After that the closest dangerous thing I later did in my live was climbing on top of a Zeppelin crane with one hand, holding a heavy Panaconis MS 4 Camcorder in the other one.

After that ABC-Training my life as a soldier became much easier, being transferred to a Prüf-Kommision, a group of high ranked soldiers who auditioned the books of the army. As I was one of the few soldiers who could 10 finger-type-writing (when I started writing scripts I learned that for good!), I was the lowest ranked soldier in the group but as we drove to other places they gave me an officer as a driver! That was quite interesting and I loved it!!!

The crew and some of the cast from my first accepted script: Eine Kerze für Kaiser Wilhelm, a screball comedy, directed by Frank Strecker who also was a popular actor, playing a detective in the very popular German Tatort series.

I am the one first row on the left side. 

So I had to stay some time with the army, we were requested to serve our country for 15 months.

Above: in my beautiful Italian Commodore uniform as a Verbindungsoffizier with the Italian Fleet in Italy.

Day off aboard the Schulschiff "Baden" going from Brindisi to Northern Italy.

Visiting the Cinecittà studios in Italy. A friend had gotten the phone number of Sophia Loren and he really called her but then did not have the nerves to ask her to meet with us at the Cinecittà. Actually I met Bud Spencer who gave me an autograph!

In 1922 I worked as Assistant director for Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Here is a photo from shooting of Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens near Weimar.

Learning to fly an airbus.

As a DP somewhere beyond the sea in South America.

But that´s too far ahead. After the army I became a student in Germany (History/Politics/Media) and still wrote for tv and also became a newspaper reporter while studying.

In 1986 I moved to Florida and later California, I got my first green card, a J-1 visa, thanks to Disney where I did work as a Disney Trainer and had some seminars at the Disney University in Orlando and also wrote PR for Wilson World. In 1987 we moved to Los Angeles.

Here in this little village near Orlando we did live for a year and yes, in the lake were alligators, our friendly neighbors. Later I decided to make a gator the sign and logo of our future production.

Below: that´s the first drawing I did myself of Mister Gator, our Logo!

You certainly did not notice that I am not such a great artist, but somehow I felt someone else might do this better.

Ingrid Littmann who was in the Unhappy End! episode withm Jean finally created this logo:

And here is THE BIRTH OF A GATOR as drawn by Isabel, who also made some great drawings for the background story of our Mr. Gator.

Here is a x-mas card with Santa Gator, also drawn by Isabel:

And here are some drawings by Isabel for a the Psychophobia-Project:

Isabel told me that I was the model for this creature and that I look exactly like that when on my computer writing a script. While Mr. Gator became our logo for our productions, Isabels drawing of me became my personal logo that I use when I am writing letters, profesionally or private. Having a closer look at the drawing I understand that there are so many people who are somehow a little bit afraid of me...

Our apartment in Buena Vista in Florida. Vonny and I had pinned lots of photos from actresses and models on our wall as we knew from the Dick Powell/Busby Berkeley musical "Dames" that if you want to sell a movie you better have a beautiful leading lady. I also remembered when "Scarface" opened in Cologne there were lots of posters advertising the movie with just the beautiful face of Michelle Pfeiffer, that quite impressed me.

In 1987 we moved from Florida to Los Angeles and first thing we did was the Studio Tours at Universal Studios. We stayed in a small Motel at Hollywood Blvd. and I wrote a script entitled "Zodiac" on a type writer Vonny bought at a garage sale and then I tried to sell it. We met with a lot of people of the televison stations there and several times were invited to Paramount Studios where we had a first look at "The Untouchables". In the 1980s there still was a touch of the old Hollywood there. We watched a re-release of Walt Disneys "Snow White" at the Egyptian and I remember that one day there was a headline that Fred Astaire had died.

We also learned the hard way what Hollywood really is: To make it there to the top you better are as good as Fred Astaire or as beautiful as Gene Tierney - or bust.

And yes, Hollywood is not only a pool full of sharks it is even worse as there are more unions in Hollywood as in Lenin´s Russia! And you won´t get inside if you are not a member of such a union. Even union members told me they has the system because they have to turn down so many jobs because they are non-union. If you are not SAG or WGA or DGA forget it, no studio can or will hire you. So next thing is: go non-union! If you want to do anything at all.

There were wonderful bookstores in Hollywood like Samuel Frenchs Film & Theater Bookstore (I think it doesn´t exist anymore) and I bought dozens of books there including many books on filmmaking. As we did not have much money and it was clear we are on our own as far as financing is concerned without a big studio behind us, I became interested how filmmakers survive doing low-budget and no-budget productions.

Lloyd Kaufman and Troma

So one day I discovered at Larry Edmunds bookstore an interesting book on filmmaking, Lloyd Kaufman´s classic: MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN MOVIE. I had watched some years ago in Germany the Kirk Douglas movie "The Last Countdown" in which Lloyd Kaufman had played the Commodore of the "Nimitz" and he also was a producer of the movie, which of course is certainly NOT a low budget movie. 

So I was surprised to discover that Kaufman and his partner Michael Hertz did run an independent Studio, Troma, shooting low budget movies and having fun.

I carefully read his book and learned al lot about filming, especially Lloyds advise to shoot in sequence, which did save us many times, his insisting on safety on the set and how to deal with talent and setting up contracts.

Lloyd did write several books on filmmaking and I consider his books as the best ones together with Truffauts Hitchcock-Book and Robert Rodriguez` "Rebel without a Crew". If you start filmmaking, those books will help you a lot getting started.

From Lloyd I also learned a very important lesson: Watch every movie and look for the best in it, no matter if the director is a 14 year old first timer or a Hollywood pro doing a 250 million dollar movie. Lloyd made several dvds on filmmaking and he treated veryone with the same respect no matter if you are famous or not.

Having read enough about how to set up a production of your own, I had to decide how to shoot. I had done half a year of learning the technical side of tv business. Having read another very goog book on filmmaking "The Total Filmmaker" written by actor-director-producer Jerry Lewis whom I adored as a child, I wanted to know how it works. Lewis wrote that he as an actor had no idea of the technical side of filmmaking so he went around on the set and asked everyone what he did and how that fits into the making of the movie. I went to a tv station, showed them my first tv-mini-movie "Eine Kerze für Kaiser Wilhelm" and they agreed that I could stay for half a year in different departments, watching how television is made. I learned about Betacam-Camcorders and how to operate an Arriflex 16mm and that for sound you better spent a little more for a Nagra and a Sennheiser.

The problem was: those things were horrible expensive and there was no way I could pay a six figure amount and Betacam or Arriflex. I had saved some money from my work for television but I had to work several months at a camp site to buy my first Camcorder. In 1989 there was a new system on the Market SVHS, far better than VHS but inferior to Betacam but: affordable for low-budget filmmakers. I went for a Panasonic NV-MS-1 (still only

Mono-sound!) and an aperture you had to be quite an artist to operate properly. Above all, the tiny viewfinder only in black and white! A couple of years later I was lucky to by the Panasonic NV-MS 4 now with stereophonic sound and an aperture that worked properly. Those models were around 4000,- to 4500,- Deutsch-Marks and so we could start filming. Of course you can also rent a camera, but if you need it a lot it is better to own and I also was then able to shoot for hire like PR-videos. And a lot of things you buy professionally you can deduct from tax, so it made sense to buy some equipment.

Of course I wanted to shoot a 90 minute movie and I tried to set up one but soon I understood also the hard way that it is very stupid to try such a thing if you do not have a lot of cash. We didn´d, so we had to find another way. I remembered to have liked the Amicus omnibus movies a lot. Those were movies - usually thriller movies or horror - 90 minutes with stars like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee but not one long story but 3 or 4 short ones connected through another story. So this was to be produced cheap as you needed the stars only for a couple of days.

So I thought of creating such an omnibus-movie. I had a title I wanted to use since I was in school: Unhappy End ! One of our teacher loved Bert Brecht and one of his plays is entitled "Happy End!" so I came up with "Unhappy End!" and that was also the concept of the stories. Like the stories of Roald Dahl there should be a twist at the end of the story you did not expect. So that was one point of the concept: everyone expects a Happy End, so I thought, o.k. let´s do Unhappy Ends! 

I liked the idea of doing things different because often writers use so many stereo-types. Once a producer gave me script to read: A Kidnapper kindnaps a young child and - how horrible ! - the boy is sick, astmathic. The producer asked me what I thougt of the story and I said I don´t like it, this has been done a thousand times, why not do it the other way around, the kidnapper is asthmatic and the kidnapped child is well trained in sports and running, so you have a totally different story and it is plausible that the child outsmarts the adult - but sich kidnapper. 

I always liked movies and tv-series that went away from the usual stereo-types and did it different. When I watched the first Dracula starring Christopher Lee and directed by Terence Fisher right at the beginning Harker walks through a door and behind him the door starts to move. You have seen this a thousand times: the door closes myseriously but not here: with a clever camera angle Fisher shows us there is a vampire-woman behind the door! I really liked that. Joss Whedon did always such things in BUFFY, one of my favorite tv-shows.

Along wiht COLUMBO, another fresh concept: there were all those police-series with car chase scenes, shootings and the question: Who did it??? and then there is COLUMBO and right from the start you know who is the killer and how he did it. Great, great concept and even better, COLUMBO does not even need a gun!

I also knew that actresses always complain in interviews that there were not anough parts for women and that´s obviously right. When I looked at the plays we read in school there were so many parts for men and so few for women.

So I wanted to have mainly women in the omnibus movie, beautiful but also very mean and bad and dagerous women. 

So I wrote the scripts for the first Unhappy End ! video. We would shoot on SVHS and release only on VHS, three omnibus stories and one story that connected all three stories: a model and a photographer shoot some photos for an advertising ad and they talk about some uncanny stories that happened to some of their friends and of course all stories have an unhappy ending!

I went finally so far that wehave only one single man in one of the stories, later with the next release we changed that, but still it were mainly women.

I also wondered about another stereotype: In almost every tv-show or movie if the heroine is kidnapped, they show you the whole movie some hero who is looking for the victim the whole screentime and then at the ending - suprise! - he finds and frees the victim. I always thought there is no suspense showing the hero walking around. The suspense is with the kidnapper and its viction who in in danger! 

Here an example: I once watched a German crime series episode, TATORT. The detective and his beautiful girlfriend stay in a hotel room and the hero goes away, the woman stays in the hotel room. And now? The camera follows the hero around he is going to see someone, asking some questions, looking for clues to solve this case. Camera stays always with the hero, we see him driving back finally to the hotel, he enters the hotelroom and NOW: in the bathroom he finds hin girlfriend: she is bound and gagged and a villain is torturing her! Surprise! Surprise!!! Now the hero beats the villain up and villain runs away and hero frees the woman. O.K.??? Griffith showed us 100 years ago how to edit a movie and Hitchcock for more than half a century gave us lessons how to edit a movie? Has anyone from that TATORT ever watched a movie by Grifftih or Hitchcock??? Why this surprise? We have 10 boring minutes showing how the hero walks around asking questions, while his girlfriend is in danger and neither hero nor audience know it!! What about suspense? Griffith would have edited this way: Camera shows us: hero leaving. Camera stays in hotel, villain ties up and gag his girlfriend, cut to hero walking around asking questions, cut to hotelroom, villain tortures girlfriend, cut to. hero returns. Now you have 10 minutes full of suspense! The way they did it you have 9 boring minutes and 1 minute of suspense.

Why would anyone do this? I really do not know.

William Wyler did a great job with THE COLLECTOR, showing the whole movie the kidnapper (Terence Stamp) and his victim (Samantha Eggar). Wilder does not cut away, he knows where the suspense is and stay right there!

When we started shooting the first episode in 1993 there was no internet and you have to find your talent in catalogues or talent agencies. There was a book "Das Film-Fernseh ABC", each year a new updated edition came out, and in this book you did find the adresses of production companies, directors and talent. So I bought this book and looked up some actresses but I also went to model agencies as we needed women that actually were as beautiful as the actresses in the famous US-TV seriea. Even as a child I had been quite impressed that in every US tv-shows there were such unbelievable beautiful actresses like Barbara Eden in "I dream of Jeannie", "Linda Evans in "The Big Valley" or Lynda Carter in "Wonder Woman" and I thought it might be a good idea to also visit some model agencies as many models also did acting jobs for tv-commericals and I really found a couple of models who were perfect for our projects.

As we shot low budget I could not afford to pay the high amounts tv or the big movie companies paid but from Lloyd Kaufman´s book I knew that most actors or actresses - if they are not stars - do not make much money and many have tor work in other jobs, as a waitress or so. I soon found out that is absolutely true and so I was able to hire some very beautiful and talented actresses or models paying them far less than a big company but much more than they earned at that moment. I myself had been amazed when an actress who was very, very good told me she had been only paid 80,- Deutsch-Marks for each performance in a small theater in Berlin. Some models told me they have to wait sometimes weeks or months till they are paid by their agencies or clients, and some actresses told me the producers of some tv-shows expect them to work for free doing a pilote and they get only paid if the project is picked up, if not no money for their work. So I made sure I paid them more they got with what they were doing right now and I always paid them within a couple of days. In one case a actress insisted to be paid her money after each shooting day, because she had so many bad expierences not being paid for her work. Whe I agreed and gave her her money after the first shooting day, she said o.k. I can pay her the rest when shooting is over, she just needed to know if I really pay her. This made a big impression on me. Many years later I shot with Lloyd Kaufman and I did not pay him a fee but we had a contract that he will get some points from distribution. After a year I met him at a filmfestival and gave him a envelope with his money. He later wrote me a letter I am the only honest person in movie-business. Whenever we met on a festival I gave him his next  payment and as he is always with friends there he pointed at me and told everyone that I always remember to pay him his money! As I had now my permanent green card we also shot our first episode in Los Angeles, the only episode in which also an actor appears.

So I had found some beautiful women I could use in the first Unhappy End ! omnibus movie but most of them were totally unknown, either very young just starting their career or models who were beautiful doing catwalk and advertising bur not known to the public. So I knwe I needed at least one or two actresses that are well known. In 1989 the Berlin Wall went down and Germany and so I decided to have have one wellknown actress form West-Germany and one from the former DDR.

There were about half a dozen young and very beautiful actresses in West German television who were wellknown by the audience, I made a list of three: Katja Bienert, Christina Plate and Svenja Pages. All three were often to be seen in tv movies or series and all three were really very attractive. Having not much money I looked them up in the Film-Ferseh-ABC and it seemed Pages and Plate were from Hamburg but Bienert from Berlin. She also was in a tv series, "Praxis Bülowbogen" which was shot in Berlin. So it was Katja Bienert I contacted first as I would not have to pay her travel from Hamburg and Hotel in Berlin. Good. Or not. As I found out, she usually lived in Berlin but also spent much time in other countries, especially Spain. Katja shot also movies in other countries like Italy, Spain, France but always came back to Germany and usually to Berlin. So we had to wait with shooting her episode till she came back from Spain.

Two other good books on Filmmaking

Robert Rodriguez made his first movie for only $ 7000 while Hitchcock movies were studio backed multi-million dollar movies with big stars.

Hitchcock had everything and Rodriguez had nothing he even donated blood and worked as a guinea pig in medical experiments to raise money for his movie.

So these are two different worlds but you can learn an awaful lot.

Rodriguez shot on 35mm but edited first on SVHS to safe money.

So finally we had our made-for-video movie ready for sales on VHS home video. I could produce now but couldn`t distribute as I had no clue how. 

There were a couple of movie and televison magazines an fanzines I read and some like MOVIESTAR and TV-HIGHLIGHTS also had a sales catalogue, selling VHS tapes and film-books.

Andreas Bethmann of X-rated who worked with MOVIESTAR sold the movie and did some great advertising in those magazines:

Above: In the MOVIESTAR Tele-Movie-Shop section, Unhappy End ! was sold. This were great PR for Unhappy End ! and surrounded by excellent programs like SciFi, Horror and the lastest tv-shows like BUFFY, X-Files or ANGEL.

The price was extremely high with almost 30,- Deutsch-Marks.

Above: The beautiful model on the cover, Bettina, was a model when I hired her, when Unhappy End ! was released she had already started working of a tv-station and soon became known as Germany´s "most beautiful face on tv". So we had besides Katja another wellknown face in our movie; along with Jennifer Behr, an actress from Los Angeles who did star in the US episode. I knew Jennifer from the televison series JUSTINE, a series with Brian Clemens as one of the writers, who had been also involved in the Britisch "The Avengers" series.

Below: the other side of the cover showing some of the actresses and also showing some of them bound and gagged. I understood very early that Bondage scenes always had been an important part of thriller- and horror movies and usually if you watch such a movie it is always the most beautiful actress who is kidnapped and bound and gagged and very ofteh put in deadly traps. So this was another important element of Unhappy End ! : there is always a damsel in distress and at the mercy of a maniac - and usually the maniac is a woman.

I was 5 or 6 years of age when I first watched the British tv series "The Avengers" starring a fantastic woman named Emma Peel and played by British actress Diana Rigg. The series was shown in primetime but also on saturday afternoons when I could watch it. Emma Peel was beautiful, tough, smartand over the top. She was certainly a domina beating up countless villains but in return she very often got captured and often tied up and gagged.

I think the first episode I watched was "The Gravediggers" and there was a lot of bondage in that episode. First, Emma Peel overpowers an attractive spy who poses as a nurse, then Emma Peel is captured and tied up and gagged by the villains and the villains gather around Mrs. Peel to discuss how they will kill her. Next we see Emma Peel being tied to railway tracks and finally she is saved by John Steed.

I watched this and knowing this is "only" television, this is not real but made up just for entertainment, I instatly knew what I wanted to do when I am grown up: shooting movies and having beautiful actresses gagged and tied to railway tracks!

"The Avengers" is one of my all-time favorite tv-series and Diana Rigg a kind of role-model for the kind of actresses in later videos we would shoot, especially THE 7 NIGHTMARES GIRL or THE TERROR STALKERS.

Maureen O´Hara and the Holy Grail

Mauree O´Hara was kind of my Holy Grail along with Diana Rigg. When around age of 10 or so I watched probably my first Alfred Hitchcock movie "Jamaica Inn", shot still in England,  starring Chrales Laughton and a very young Maureen O´Hara. In the long final sequence, O´Hara is kidnapped by Laughton and is bound and gagged for quite a long time and looks hilarious. The movie was a success and O´Hara became a star and her next movie - again with Laughton - was "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". She played Esmeralda and in this movie too, she spent quite a time being tied up or being tortured when accused of being a witch. The formula obviously worked well. O´Hara soon played in many movies (in early breath-taking technicolor!) beautiful aggressive women and she had many domina scenes beauting up men but she had even more seens being kidnapped and usually being bound, gagged, whipped and tortured. In "The Black Swan" we have almost the same kind of seen like in "Jamaica Inn", but this time she fights Tyrone Power so hard when he ties her up and gags her that HE has to call for help that some other pirate assists him overpowering O´Hara and in some of here next movies like "Buffalo Bill" and others there are three or more man who are necessary to kidnapp and tie her up.

And even in the many A-List movies she did there were some strange S/M scenes and fight scenes with her co-stars and if she isn´t tied up and gagged she usually is spanked in several movies.

In "McClintock" John Wayne beats her up for good. In interviews O´Haro told Wayne really spanked her and she actually wanted to be the scene even more brutal but Wayne objected, he was the producer and said if they go further they won´t get a General Audience -Rating!

I always remembered those scenes with Diana Rigg being tied to the railway tracks and Maureen O´Hara being bound and gagged in "Jamaica Inn" and that´s what I wanted to show in "Unhappy End!" Beautiful actresses, bound and gagged at mercy of an uncanny villain or in our case: villainess!

When we started selling "Unhappy End!" on VHS it was sold through the Tele-Movie-Shop but also in some videostores in Berlin. Once the owner of a videostore called me and told me he needs more tapes as some guy wanted to buy more than a dozen.

I personally delivered the tapes and the customer was there when I came to the store waiting for the tapes. He told me he buys the tapes for himself and several friends and he said it is so great some filmmaker finally understood that those bondage scenes are the most suspenseful scenes in a movie and in many movies those most suspenseful scenes are just 1 or 2 minutes and her really thought it was quite good that those scenes in my movie were so long! Indeed I kew bondage-scenes always were important since the days of silent movies when the heroin had been tied up to tracks and later when Republic Studios did all those serials starring Linda Stirling or Kay Aldrige.

The guy told me that there are many bondage fetishists around and threre are websites listing every bondage scene every actress ever did and there are even special words in this community like: The Holy Grail . The Holy Grail means here: The first or best scene someone watches with a beautiful actress in bondage and I found out that many, many fans have the same holy grail, that is: Diana Rigg gagged and tied to railway tracks in "The Gravediggers" episode!

Stanton has a story in which someone comes to a castle and in the entrance is a painting showing Maureen O´Hara in her bondage scene from "Jamaica Inn", another Holy Grail obviously for many people. So I realized there is quite an audience out there for this little fetish things.

Karin Dor

At age 14 or 15 I watched for the first time "Der Schatz im Silbersee". There were Pierre Brice and Lex Barker, whom I knew from his "Tarzan" movies and the wonderful Herbert Lom (most people know from the Pink Panther movies) but there was somone else: Karin Dor, probably the most beautiful creatur in this unverserse. Karin Dor lookes sensationall in this movie and practically when she appeares onscreen she immediately gets kidnapped and tied to a post. And this goes on and on. She gets freed, is taken prisoner again, is freed by the heroes, captured and tied up again, actually she has more screentime being tied up in this movie than scenes where she is free. And she looked fantastic tied up. Obviously I am not the only one who noticed this as Miss Dor did many movies and she very often is tied up (but as far as I remember never gagged). She did also some Edgar Wallace movies and in one of the best "Die Bande des Schreckens" she has 3 bondage scenes and there are lots of movies with her in which she is tied up too. 

The Perfect Unhappy End!-Heroine

So there were three role-models I had for the kind of women I wanted to have in the Unhappy End! series: Diana Rigg, Maureen O´Hara and Karin Dor.

I went to agencies looking for models and actresses, doing some shootings and as I had still that Emma Peel fetish thing with all those leather suits in mind, I went in this direction, knowing that actually we will not really do that in the Unhappy End! series, but I kept it in mind and used it later.

Anyway I found a model who looked perfect, that was exactly the type I had been looking for. The model´s name is Suzanna-Maria and she actually looked as beautiful as any serial heroine from an Aaaron Spelling series or Baywatch or even better!:

A shot in the studio and then:

another background.

and in black & white 

and some more:

looking at the photos of Suzanna-Maria I knew we can find the right models and actresses who look as beautiful as the girls from Holllywood.

More Tele-Movie-Shop ads

I never got the exact figures but obviously the tapes sold and so we stayed in the Tele-Movie-Show what meant that our crazy little low-budget production had been promoted by those wonderful movie magazines and we were just next to all those fantasy, Sci-Fi and Horror-Movies.

Luck is a Lady

and we have been lucky with some of our leading ladies. We did not only have some wellknown names in our moive like Katja Bienert and Jennifer Behr, some of the women we had in Unhappy End! made shortly after quite a career like Bettina in TV or Jean who became elected" Miss Berlin" shortly after our first shooting and later she did advertising and also television including a guest part in the very popular series "Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten".

Unhappy End ! or: Deadly Enemy?

We went on shooting new episodes and doing a second VHS tape, later followed a dvd. Instead of using the title "Unhappy End!" the distributers decided to use the title "Deadly Enemy" (the English title of the German episode "Die Schulfeindin"

Again we had an omnibus movie with 3 stories and another one connecting the three. The longest episode, "Die Schulfeindin" featured Marlene Marlow a young German actress who had already starred in a 35mm movie and shortly after she had several smaller parts in German tv series and then starring in the very popular series "Die Rettungsflieger". We also were lucky that some of the other actresses we worked with shortly after shooting with us got also parts in popular tv-shows; Katrein Frenzel became a regular in "Hinter Gittern" and Magdalena got a part in the very popular comedy show "Freitat Nacht News", she was in several sitcomes and even got a part in the "X-Files". Stefanie and Michaela were excellent actresses doing theater, Micaela sometimes also tv-shows.

Marlene Marlow in "Die Schulfeindin". Marlene certainly was one of the most attractive actresses of German television. "Die Schulfeindin" is about to young women who went together to school and later meet accidentely, Angela (Marlene Marlow) and Miriam (Kerstin Orf). Miriam always hated Angela who is rich and beautiful, while Miriam is desperately needing  money. Miriam together with her evil friend Karin take Angela prisoner and they plan to rob and kill her.

Magdalena and Michaela in "Der Mörder mit den Zigarillos": a serial killer is after young women who enter in a beauty contest.

Stefanie Verkerk and Katrein Frenzel in the episode "Die Szenediebin" about actress who steals a job of another actress. (and yes, that happens a lot in this business!)

Having worked now mainly in Germany we decided to do also some episodes in other countries, especially in the US in Hollywood but also in European countries and so over the years we shot mainly in Germany and the US but also in France, Italy, Spain and England.

And we stayed with the formula and tried to get also in the new episodes some wellknown actresses from tv-shows and on the other hand beautiful models.

Sabrina in the episode that connected the other three.

Again we were lucky, Moviestar and other movie magazines featured our series.

Sometimes "Deadly Enemy" is presented as Erotic-Thriller, I had no idea why. We had very beautiful actresses of course, but actually usually no nude scenes.

In this case I thing they put us next to Jess Franco because Katja Bienert who meanwhilde did co-produce some episodes had worked several times with Jess Franco.

There were also some PR and articles in other movie and dvd magazines:

and here something from the deadline magazine:

Over the years we shot more and more Unhappy End! episodes with actresses from all over the world.

While Unhappy End! became a little more known we tried to do some stories without the usual fetish scenes, including crime, comedy and love stories with an Unhappy Ending.

Stills from "Immer Vollmond" written by Katja Bienert.

"Immer Vollmond" produced & directed by Katja starring Katja and again Marlene and this time and I think for the first time more men than in any previous episode.

Some audience (and critics) did like this broadened concept but some did not. I got mails and some people told me they were disappointed that there was an "Unhappy End!" episode with Marlene Marlow and that Marlene hadn´t been tied up in this episode what they audience actually expected to happen!

I actually understood this as this was exactly the same I expected when I watched "The Avengers" with Diana Rigg or any movie starring Maureen O´Hara or Karin Dor.

Diana Rigg did around 50 episodes of "The Avengers" and I guess she had been tied up as many times, not in every episode once, there were episodes in which she had been tied up of course, on the other hands there were episodes like "The Gravediggers" or "Epic" when she had been tied up several times.

And of course not only Diana Rigg, Maureen O´Hara or Karin Dor. There were many beautiful actresses who did bondage scenes.

Lynda Carter, Samantha Eggar or Debra Paget, Ava Gardner, Brigitte Bardot, they all had such scenes, some of them like Lynda Carter or Samantha Eggar quite often.

There was a special kind of entertainment: The Movie Serials. Several studios did produce serials but THE studio for serials was Republic Pictures! There were Jungle Perils, Spy-serials, even the first comic-book serials based on the Superman and Batman serials. The interessting thing wtih Republic is, they had many serials starring Emma Peel-like heroines who could fight, shoot and looked absolutely stunning, especially when there were captured by the villains and they usually got tied up, gagged and put in danger perils. Most of the beautiful leading ladies were models and not actresses when they startet. Linda Stirling, Kay Aldrige, Lorna Gray or Frances Gifford were some of the most beautifuls. Those serials had very long scenes showing the heroine bound and gagged as this was obviously what the audience wanted.

Linda Stirling once told in an interview: "I made my living getting beat up, tied up, gagged and thrown off horses..." and that describes exactly what the Republic serials were all about.

When televison came the serials disappeared for a long time from the big screen and in the 1980s Spielberg and Lucas who had been fans too, did "Indiana Jones", a kind of hommage to the serials.

There was of course a connection between those serials and the comic books. Most comic books featured Damsel in Distress scenes like the ones Pearl White did in "Perils of Pauline". Pearl White had been the role-model for the heroines that came in comic books and movies like Lois Lane, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Sue Storm and many more.

Lois Lane and Wonder Woman certainly were into bondage and the creator of Wonder Woman William Moulton Marston went very, very far. Marston´s Wonder Woman and John Willies "Gewndoline" are absed on the same fetish.

From Pearl White to Lois Lane or Wonder Woman all those women were strong, tough, beautiful and so often tied up and gagged in deadly perils.

The concept of a strong and beautiful woman being helpless bound and gagged at the mercy of a villain or even better of an villainess obviously appealed to men AND women. There were is a scene in the Avengers Episode "Epic": Beautiful young Diana Rigg is tied up and abolut to be cut in half with a circular saw. She is at mercy of another actress, played by guest star Isa Miranda and that is quite an interessting scene: Diana Rigg is the star of the series but she is helpless, tied up, the victim while Isa Miranda who actually plays a supporting role is shown in the stronger position. That is not only interessting within the story but also in the way the actresses play their parts. I absolutely loved this concept and unsed is many times. It worked very well especially in "Die Schulfeindin" when Marlene Marlow is the leading lady but she is tied up almost her total screentime at mercy of her enemy Miriam. As long as Marlene isn´t gagged she still can act strong and when talking to Miriam she manages to appear stronger than Miriam, talking kind of down to her; but as soon when she is gagged, she is totally helpless and Miriam (as her character) and Kerstin as an actress is now in the stronger position. 

It is also interesting for the audience: most men would like to be now the white knight in shining armour and beat up Miriam and then free Angela (with the exception of fetishists of course. Women on the other hand can either identify with the victim or also enjoy seeing the beautiful heroine being tied up and tortured.

When we once prepared a new episode I had already hired an actress to play the villainess who takes the heroine prisoner and (wo-)manhandling her. When I talked to her about who could play her victim we looked at some photographs of models and actresses I considered for the part. The actress looked at one of the photographs and said, she had just met that very attractive actress; there was a party and this actress is totally arrogant. So I guessed she did not want to work with her, but she told me that she actually wants her to play that part and she will take lots of ropes and will tie her up for good, she really will enjoy to let this actress suffer a lot! 

Shooting another project we also had a scene were the beautiful heroine is bound and gagged and tortured by the villainess. At lunchbreak everyone left the set to go to lunch and I stayed with the leading lady to untie her. She then told me that the other actress is ovbiously a method-actress and really hurts her. I promised her that I will talk to her right after lunch but she stopped me and told me that it´s o.k. with her, when she is beaten up for real, her reaction - as an actress - also are real and she could bear it, but she wants me to know how much she suffers to make my movie! 

The Comic Book artists know very well how exciting those damels in distress scenes are: A woman being sacrified, a woman bound and gagged in deadly perils or a Jungle Girl being captured and tied up by...whatever!

In the 1970s and 1980s ZACK featured many suspenseful comic strips.

Another "Holy Grail" was in a Sven Janssen comcic strip:

his beautiful wife Britta is kidnapped and put in a trap bound and gagged.

The way it has been done looks like a storyboard for a Republic Serial. So there are a lot of common ideas in comic books and movie or tv series.

And while in most comic books those scenes are only a smaller part of the story, John Willie put his fetish right in the center, what I actually thought a very good idea and so made the fetish scenes in our series the main part of the story.

Over the next years MOVIESTAR promoted the series, in the meantime we had 5 VHS tapes released. I also did a sixth one but those wasn´t anymore released; some of the episodes not released here we put later on our VOD distribution site, but still not all what we have shot.

with director Martin Schmidt shooting The Terror Stalkers

shooting The Terror Stalkers with director Martin Schmidt and leading lady Jean Bork

when Russian director Dziga Vertow visited our set he namend me "The Man with the Camera" as I always had my new Panasonic with me.

with Toxie and Troma´s Lloyd Kaufman in The Prince Charles Theater in London where we shot some scenes for The Terror Stalkers in 2013.