By Hank Reineke

Few would have argument with Shakespeare’s belief that all the world’s a stage, but for some folks the stage was simply not enough. It certainly wasn’t for Edgar Lansbury, the younger brother of actress Angela Lansbury. Edgar Lansbury was a significant figure of New York City theatre, having produced a number of Broadway dramas and musicals from 1954 on. One of his earliest collaborators was a renaissance man of New York’s theatre scene, Joseph Beruh. Beruh and Lansbury became acquainted when the former was cast in the Lansbury’s 1954 production of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera at Greenwich Village’s Lucille Lortel Theatre.

Beruh would subsequently and dependably multitask in all of Lansbury’s productions circa 1957-1970. Beruh wore many different hats during this period: as performer, General Manager, Assistant Stage Manager and Production Assistant. In 1972, Beruh seemingly was given his due. He and Lansbury were now co-producing shows in midtown Manhattan as full partners, first with playwright Paul Foster’s Elizabeth I at Manhattan’s Lyceum and later with the Stephen Schwartz/Bob Randall musical The Magic Show at the Cort.

Prior to their partnership, Lansbury alone chose to test openings into the film industry. His interest was practical and, in the words of one newspaper columnist, due to the “precarious state of Broadway [which] almost forces theatre producers to diversify.” The resulting film, The Subject Was Roses (1968), would feature Broadway actor Jack Albertson reprising his stage role in Lansbury’s stage production. The actor was cast alongside Patricia Neal, the latter valiantly struggling back from suffering a series of debilitating strokes. The film itself was playwright Frank D. Gilroy’s cinematic adaptation of his own successful drama. As a theatrical drama, The Subject Was Roses ran for nearly two years and 832 performances from May 1964 through May 1966, successfully staged at several New York City venues. Though Lansbury’s film version performed only modestly well at the movie box office, both Neal and Albertson were honored by the Academy, each nominated, respectively, in the Best Actress in a Leading Role and Best Actor in a Supporting Role categories.

Lansbury’s second foray into feature film production would be with new partner Joseph Beruh acting as co-producer. The picture was James Ivory’s The Wild Party (1975), a dramatic comedy set in the Roaring ‘20s. The Wild Party, which featured James Coco and Raquel Welch, also did not tally up as a successful domestic release. This was in part, no doubt, due to the fact the MGM film did not enjoy a widespread general release in the U.S. Looking to broker an overseas deal to capitalize on their disappointing investment, the producers brought the film to the film festival at Cannes that same year.

It was at Cannes that Lansbury and Beruh discovered the foreign market’s seemingly insatiable interest in acquiring low-budget horror films for distribution. A friend and colleague happened to be in Cannes that very same year, to showcase his newest horror picture already raking in bushels of cash. As Beruh recalled, this friend “told us how well it did it Europe and how much money it was making.” So the two prospective producers graciously attended a screening of their friend’s fright pic cash-cow. They discovered, to Beruh’s surprise, that their friend’s film “was terrible. We decided we could make a horror film far better than that.”

The seed idea of producing a low-budget horror was appealing to them. It certainly triggered their safe-bet business acumen, and seemed reasonable to invest in an inexpensive horror pic upon their return home. Should their horror picture perform poorly in the States, there was still the safeguard of selling and distributing the pic oversea to offset any domestic loss. Their decision to move forward with their plan was wise and prudent. Even before their very first horror pic, Squirm (1976), was set to unleash at cinemas and drive-ins across the U.S., foreign market pre-sales had already guaranteed they’d recoup all of their investment.

The question was where to start? “It’s easier said than done to find a good script,” Lansbury explained to one entertainment journalist. In a separate interview with a news writer from Rochester, New York’s Democrat and Chronicle, Lansbury more fully explained, “There aren’t many good writers, especially in this genre. Too many of the scripts are actually tongue-in-cheek comments on horror films […]. We wanted a real story of terror and suspense.” “We looked at about forty [scripts] in the next few weeks and finally found Jeff Lieberman,” he offered to columnist Joan E. Vadeboncoeur. There was a major sticking point, however: Lieberman would “sell the script only on the condition that he’d direct the project.

“It was a big risk, but a good one,” Lansbury would offer in retrospect. Lieberman was an unknown, but had been “remarkably eloquent speaking about his project and he had done editing for an art film company.” Beruh, for his part, also was intrigued by the script for Squirm, not interested in financing a Vincent Price Gothic-type of horror film. Beruh too was looking to find a script offering a scenario fresh and original. As he remembered it, the sorting through piles of prospective scripts was challenging and tiring. “We were sitting around the office one day,” he told newsman Gene Grey, “wondering why nobody had written a good horror film.” That changed when a “long-haired kid, Jeff Lieberman” came in to pitch his screenplay. “We liked his script a lot,” Beruh confessed, “but there was a catch. He wouldn’t sell it unless he got the chance to direct it.”

As Lieberman recalls, the film producer Edward R. Pressman – who had recently oversaw production of Brian De Palma’s horror-rock musical Phantom of the Paradise (1974) was also interested in Squirm. But it was Lansbury and Beruh who moved more aggressively to seal a deal. The two executive producers immediately turned to Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American-International Pictures – the distributor of their ill-fated The Wild Party – for advice and financing. This was a prudent move as Arkoff’s A.I.P. had a long, storied history of giving young, untested talent a chance of entry into the film industry. To be sure, Arkoff wasn’t a particularly generous, benevolent benefactor in this regard. But he was certainly well aware that young, aspiring talent would work the hardest – and, perhaps more importantly - for the least amount of financial recompense.

Jeff Lieberman was a self-confessed admirer of the films of Alfred Hitchcock and, according to Lansbury, closely “modeled his script after that master.” (Upon the film’s release, several critics noted the similarities of Lieberman’s film to Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Though Lieberman’s credentials were slim, he was no neophyte nor amateur. He had already incorporated his own business, Jeff Lieberman Associates, writing and producing a number of documentaries titled “The Art of Film,” distributing the series through college film studies programs. He had also written and directed a twenty-minute long satirical short titled The Ringer (1972), which garnered prizes at film festivals in Atlanta, Chicago and Washington D.C.

In two of this releases Special Features included in this set, “Digging In: The Making of Squirm” and “Eureka! A Tour of Locations with Jeff Lieberman” the writer/director reminisces the first draft of the film script was initially written – literally, on yellow-legal pad sheets – circa 1973 when he was all of 25 or 26 years old. Unable to type, his wife was consigned to that duty, thinking her husband’s scenario as imagined was “the worse I ever heard.” Though she would be proven wrong, the very idea of a sea of monstrous worms surfacing from the soil to feed on human flesh had been inspired by an unusual set of circumstances.

Lieberman’s science-minded older brother had read in an issue of the scouting Boy’s Life magazine that if one transmitted electric impulses (via a model train transformer) through soil, this would cause earth worms to be drawn to the surface. The curious brothers would experiment to that effect, the then thirteen/fourteen year old future filmmaker learning such trails of electrification to be true. A decade later - and having grown up in the era Timothy Leary still-legal LSD experimentations - Lieberman chose to dose. The experience with acid triggered memories of his earlier backyard scientific experiments - and hallucinations of a terrifying worm onslaught. All grist for the writer’s mill…

Lieberman’s story (as filmed) is set in the backwoods town of Fly Creek, Georgia, a remote, mostly desolate tourist destination for antique hounds and fishermen. A sassy, red-haired local gal, Geraldine “Geri” Sanders (Patricia Pearcy) lives on the outskirts of town with her sister Alma (Fran Higgins) and widowed mother Naomi (Jean Sullivan). The Sanders live astride a Worm Farm operated by the crusty Willie Grimes (Carl Dagenhart) and his simpleton son Roger (R.A. Dow). Geri has been mooning for a New York City boy, Mick (Don Scardino) whom she met sometime back and invited to visit under the guise of helping him locate antiques. Mick’s visit does not sit well with jealous Roger who too has been holding a torch for Geri.

There’s lots of exposition in the film’s first reel, and we meet a number of locals – including Sheriff Reston (Peter MacLean) who appears to have little patience for city-slicker Mick. The unfriendly townsfolk are “suspicious of strangers,” as per Geri. It doesn’t help that Mick’s visit coincides with a local emergency. A powerful storm has swept through Fly Creek flooding the town and making roads impassable. The town has been left with no power nor telephone capacities. The violent storm has in fact knocked over a number of power towers, cascading live wires sending 300,000 volts of electricity into the muddy soil.

Regardless, Geri drives Mick over to Aaron Beardsley’s antique shop for a look, but the old man is oddly nowhere to be found. They do find a skeleton on Beardsley’s property that might, or might not, be him. It’s around this time that Mick transforms into one of the Hardy Boys, trying to unravel the Beardsley mystery, even breaking into a medical office to examine the old man’s dental records. Mick eventually deduces that it was the sudden conduction of fallen electric wires with “soaking mud” that has summoned 250,000 flesh-eating worms, nightly, to feast on the townspeople. That’s the story at its most basic anyway. There’s a subplot or two woven into the storyline as well, but the rest of the film leaves viewers to contemplate who will or who will not survive this awful “night of crawling terror.”

“This was the night of crawling terror” was the promotional tag of the film’s one-sheet poster. The producers were initially unhappy that the film was being marketed as simply another “animal fright film,” a genre now in vogue, especially in following the runaway success of Spielberg’s Jaws. Beruh told journalist Carol Wilson Utley he thought Squirm was more Hitchcock in its styling and more frightful than Jaws. After all, Beruh reasoned, “sharks are just in the ocean” and, should one choose, absolutely avoidable. On the other hand, “worms are everywhere.” Beruh was also put off by the horrific poster art commissioned for the film, a garish, colorful image of worms and corpses and tree trunks emanating from a grimacing, evil skull. “This is not just another horror movie,” Beruh defended. “It’s also a good movie – a well-made movie. But to insure its success they want to get all the real hardcore horror fans out.”

Squirm was given a budget of some $400,000 with photography to commence in November of 1975. Lieberman’s original script set the film in New England, amidst a “Lovecraft type” of fishing village. The problem was that the New England climate was thought too inhospitable for a November filming. There was one lifeline. The state of Georgia was slowly becoming a hub of film production, Georgia’s Department of Community Development happy to welcome prospective film projects to the area. One of the more recent and successful projects launched in the Peach State was United Artist’s Burt Reynolds’s action pic Gator (1976), that film’s box office success having sparked interest in Georgia’s low-cost hospitality.

The one drawback in this dramatic change of scenery was that many of the New York area actors originally considered for roles were now redundant. The geographic change to slangy southern dictions would cause both re-scripting and the casting of local talent (and even a number of non-actors) for roles in the production. One budding actress anxious to be cast was twenty-one year old Kim Basinger, who even agreed to taking on the role of Geri Sanders even though it called for a nude scene. Lieberman retrospectively sighs his decision to pass on casting Basinger was likely an opportunity lost for fanboys everywhere. The leading players of the cast were proven professionals gleaned from New York, Massachusetts and Texas.

The primary location shooting of Squirm was to commence in the seacoast town of Wentworth and areas near Savannah. Principal photography began in Savannah on Monday, 10 November. Serving as executive producers (George Manasse would produce), Lansbury and Beruh would form a limited partnership, appropriately named “The Squirm Company,” to oversee production of the film. Box Office would report the film was in the can by early January of 1976. That said, things got off to a rough start. Lieberman recalls that due to a generator having exploded on the first day of filming, as director he had already fallen behind the agreed upon production schedule by the third day of shooting.

This nearly resulted of his dismissal, New York executives angry of not getting any of the promised rushes to view as demanded. Lieberman recollects it was the film’s cinematographer, Joseph Mangine, who saved him, advising him to abandon his idea of shooting the film in sequential sequence and instead concentrating on getting as much footage in the can as quick set-ups and breakdowns allowed. Within days of going this route, the crew was back on schedule. The autumn weather – even that of southern Georgia – was alternately sunny then grey, gloomy and overcast. Leading actor Don Scardino (“Mick”), who would soon work with Lansbury and Beruh on the Broadway stage production of Godspell, thought the mixed weather and inclusion of local talent brought the film, “a strange, truthful ambiance.”

For the film’s exciting conclusion, some 250,000 worms were brought in to complete the final “big” sequence. This required the assistance of a local Boy Scout troop “to assist in the handling” of the worms. In fact, the scouts were buried strategically and hidden under mounds of worms – real and of rubber – and tasked to bounce beneath as to create the “percolating” mass we see on-screen. For their trouble, each Scout was reportedly promised a Merit Badge. It must be said that Lieberman’s direction is effective in bringing to the film a sense of creepy, growing tension. The micro close-up cut in shots of real-life fanged worms are certainly disturbing. There is a bit of gore, but not as much as one might expect from a film of this type. Lieberman would tell the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, “My violence is implied. I believe a filmmaker can never present on screen as much violence as an audience’s own mind can imagine.”

Variety reported that with editing of Squirm near completion, distributor previews would begin in New York City the week of 12 April, with secondary screenings to follow in Los Angeles the week of 19 April. In June, Lansbury and Beruh brought the film to Cannes, choosing to “pack the four […] screenings with non-pro locals, thus giving potential buyers a taste of how the general public would react to the film.” This gambit paid off and by the festival’s end they had made a deal with no fewer than sixteen territories at a guarantee of a half-million dollars. To the confusion on many industry watchers, the shrewd Arkoff instructed the producers to forego any “terrific” upfront and advance foreign deals and instead choose what initially appeared to be mere “reasonable” percentage offerings. This percentage decision was a wise one as the film performed exceptionally well in the United Kingdom and other European markets.

Closer to home, the filmmakers were looking for an open spot on the future release roster of a major Hollywood studio. They thought they saw opportunity for Columbia Pictures to bring their modest horror-meller to theatres nationwide. The publicity department at Columbia thought Squirm as a great investment and a cash-generating exploitable. The only thing required was the blessing of Columbia Pictures president David Begelman. The deal might have happened had it not been for the intervention of Begelman’s wife. Begelman’s significant other happened to attend the Squirm screening with him, mortified and aghast at the Glycera-inspired carnage unfolding before her eyes. She convinced him not to have anything to do with what she thought cinematic trash. Her advice proved ill-informed and costly. The film was ultimately picked up by Paramount.

If Paramount was a big winner, so was Lieberman, A.I.P., Lansbury and Beruh. The two producers quickly signed Lieberman to a fresh contract to deliver a second sci-fi thriller of his own scripting, another LSD-inspired fever-dream titled Blue Sunshine. Following the test-market of Squirm in Buffalo, New York, Paramount released the film, to the excitement of horror movie devotees in the several regional markets, on Wednesday 14 July 1976.