---What are you doing right now?
I'm suppose to go to Montana to direct a piece for…ABC has done a series of these shows called "Totally Out of Control Videos" And I created "Totally Out of Control Love" and "Totally Out of Control Vacation."…It's all about weird and bizarre stories, y'know: people who got married jumping off of cliffs and underwater and y'know, weird love…

---And do you have Faces of Death on your resume?
Yeah (laughs) I do have Faces of Death on my resume. It's funny cause years ago; I did it under a pseudonym, obviously, because we thought it'd never come to America. And what happened is it opened on 42nd Street years later, and I'll never forget: in the 80's I wrote episodics for like Night Rider and Street Hawk and Automan and Fall Guy…and here I was, a prime-time writer and all of a sudden on the news one night: this movie called Faces of Death…Dan Rather on CBS was talking about these incredibly horrible videos. Cause everybody thought they were real.

---What was the pseudonym you used?
Alan Black: my middle name is Alan and Shwartza means black in German. The only person that used their real name was our cameraman, and his real name is Peter B. Good, and no one would believe that was his real name anyway.

---How do your business associates react when they find out you did Faces of Death?
Some are impressed, some are put off, but it can't be denied…It's my legacy at this point, but there's a lot I want to do…but I am proud that I was able to take a form and change a form and add new twists to a reality form that's still to this day being emulated…the techniques are still very valid in Hollywood today…for that I'm proud of the film making process of it. ---It was one of the only times in all of my Hollywood experiences; see what happens in Hollywood is that your work gets diluted because there are a lot of people involved in the mix…the beauty of (Faces of Death) was that we were totally left alone, unsupervised to go create something.

---How did you guys come up with the idea to do Faces of Death
The Japanese came to us and said, "Will you create a film about death?" What inspired the structure of the film was I'd recently seen Mondo Connie and another film called the Helstrom Chronicle…about bugs taking over the Earth and it's an incredible documentary and it profoundly moved me when I saw it cause it fooled me and I said, "Well, I'm gonna fool people with death."

---What were you doing before that, that the Japanese knew about you?
We had done a lot of animal and family and travel documentaries. Our company was pretty well known in that area. Prior to that I had been a film editor on "In Search Of…" I was in my late twenties when I did this…The film company came to us and they said, "Would you make a movie about death: strictly for the Japanese marketplace." So they guy I was working with came up with a title and I came up with the concept which was: over the past 25 years there's this Pathologist who's put together a library of death and the movie is a chronicle of his experiences. So, we traveled to all these different film libraries to see what we could find about death and disaster. So I spent a lot of time in those days at the Grinberg Library in New York and UPI in New York. After looking at the footage…I found for example, the jumper in Faces of Death. I found this footage of this woman jumping off a building and it was just incredible footage. The part of the footage we didn't have was the after math so we did inserts into actual footage that we bought to match it, y'know. We were the first people ever to really take documentaries where we were transferring video onto film…It took about a year to put together, cause it was tricky.

---And also fake. How did you guys film the fake scenes?
We wanted to do an electrocution scene, which is a very famous scene in FOD, and everybody thinks it's real. And my research material for that: I happened to pick up HUSTLER magazine and there was a great article about electrocution that really detailed how a person is executed. At the time Larry Flint was way out there. And that's what I used as my basis and we cast it…and we shot it as M.O.S. means Movie Without Sound and we built a "cell" in a friends loft and we lined the guy's mouth with toothpaste: this really good actor from Baltimore who was like many of the actors (in California) looking for work. So I would count 1-1000, 2-1000 and he would start to drool and all this white shit would come out of his mouth.

---How did you put out the word for actors?
All friends in town…I have a famous casting couch story about the flesh-eating cult, which was my segment where there was this madman who lived in San Francisco…at the end of it we got into this scene where there was like an orgy and it got really out of control cause everyone was rubbing themselves with blood and half-naked….I made appearances in each of these movies: in the first one I am the leader of the flesh eating cult. In the second I'm the crazy drugged out killer and they call it J.S. Drugs, those are my initials. And in the third one I play this um…freaky rapist in this courtroom scene and they show the rape on video and it just so happens that the girl was this girl I was dating at the time.

How did you talk her into doing that?
She was a bit of an exhibitionist, so it wasn't too much of a problem.

---What about the rest of the actors?
Everyone who worked on that film got paid

How much did you end up spending, making Faces of Death?
The original was made for 450,000 and to date it's grossed over 35-40 million dollars. Unfortunately the money didn't go to me or really the company that made it: it went to a lot of other people who were involved in it.

Where was the movie first shown?
---When we first screened the movie…at 20th Century Fox and we invited everyone we knew and we filled up this theater with about 700 people and nobody knew what they were gonna see. At the end of the movie there was silence in the auditorium. (my girlfriend's father) who was this really brilliant doctor, who has since died and he said he thought it was the most extensive movie ever made about death that he had ever seen…I have the legitimate seal of approval from a physician…That was a great moment in rationalizing all my insanity.

---Were you involved in the sequels as well?
I was involved in two and three and in the fourth one I no longer wanted to do it and my brother actually plays the new (doctor). And wrote it.

---And he went on to do four five and six?
No, no, no there are only four. Then there's the "worst of".

Do you feel like you were ahead of the curve as far as this whole 'reality entertainment' trend?
---All these reality shows; I really began, being the creator of Faces of Death; I'm sort of like the Godfather of reality television, that's what this lecture company calls me. SO I'm out there pitching all different kinds of reality shows…reality's become such a big thing now…a form that can't be neglected or denied any longer.

With all the remaking of popular culture crapola, has anyone tried to convince you to do a FOD remake?
---Many years ago I was gonna do a similar one, a bogus Masters and Johnson one about abhorrent sex around the world…it was called the "Pleasure Seekers". With some other guy. It just went south.

Anything else interesting you want to tell me about before the interview's over?
---Amazing things happened to me while making (Faces of Death). I went to this reeeeally gifted psychic in East Los Angeles, she was a medium, and she actually went into this trance and she started to scream when she went into this trance cause she said, "Oh my god! You're a killer: I see blood all over! Who are you? What are you doing?! What are you doing in my house?!" And what had happened is that I'd just been (filming) a lot of slaughterhouses and there was incredible blood all over the place...We were so crazy during those days like, we'd be in the slaughterhouse and we'd go and we'd go eat a steak for lunch. .