Thursday, July 08, 2010

"Skunk Ape Film Full of Fright"

While searching for information on producer-director Luke Moberly's obscure sophomore follow-up to LITTLE LAURA & BIG JOHN (1973) -- another 1920's period piece titled SWEET TALKER (a.k.a. CLAY TEETER and DEVIL IN THE SKY), from '74 -- we came across this article about Moberly's third production, which we're assuming never got made.


UPDATE: Longtime T.O.S. contributor John Donaldson has provided more info about Mr. Moberly's "Skunk Ape" project. The following article appeared 6 years later in the Lakeland Ledger (Aug 25, 1981, page 1C-2C).



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know if you've ever answered this before, but how do you go about doing your research for films like this? Do you just scour Google and/or newspapers that are in the regions these films were made or is there more to it than that?

Temple of Schlock said...

I use Google, for sure, but since I'm a librarian by profession I still believe in legwork. That means hitting libraries in various cities, if I happen to be near a good one while on vacation or visiting on business. In the past 10 months alone I've spent time in libraries and archives in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Cleveland and Denver. This has been an interest of mine for a long time. I have notebooks filled with 30 years of research. A good chunk of that comes from scrolling through newspapers from various cities -- N.Y.C., Miami, Atlanta, L.A., Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, etc. -- as well as rolls and rolls of Variety, The Village Voice and El Diario. I've also gone page-by-page through Boxoffice magazine between the years 1965 and 1985. I'm so crazy I've even typed keywords into the MPAA database and worked backwards trying to find info on mystery titles I've found that way. Yeah, I know -- "Get a life!" What can I say? It's what I like doing. Plus, it always helps to be part of a network of friends with similar interests, and I frequently get help from my peeps: Michael Gingold, Steve Puchalski, John Donaldson, Daniel Griffith, Bob Plante, Mike MacCollum, Fred Adelman, Don Guarisco, Jon Putnam, The Flying Maciste Brothers, John Charles, David Konow, Richard Harland Smith, John Lyons, Paul Talbot, Brian Albright, Lars Nilsen, Harry Guerro, Jim Healy, Robert Richardson, Marc Edward Heuck, Steve Ryfle... to name a few.

Unknown said...

Hi my names stephanie. And luke moberly is my grandfather. He has his script for sale on amazon for kindle for $5.99 of the skunk ape.. you should check it out if you would still be interested!