Once again, I am grateful for the opportunity to hopefully jump in and clarify a little.
"Name For Evil", originally titled "The Grove", was shot outside of Vancouver, up the Indian Arm River, over the summer of 1970. Bob had a trailer carted up the river and he and his then wife (and co-star) Sheila Sullivan, lived in it, on the bank of the river, directly across from the famous "Wigwam", an old hotel purportedly built for The Kaiser, who hoped to retire there after the First World War.
Nearly the entire film was shot in The Wigwam, which was abandoned at the time. Bob believed in the film, or at least what could be done with it, to the extent that he was rewriting the entire thing as they went along (with Barney Girard's consent, one gathers). Bob wanted to shift it from a straight ahead ghost story to something more along the lines of a man trying to "find himself" after a loss of identity from being part of "The Establishment" and instead of it being a ghost haunting him, it is really the man himself, going mad.
Most of the dialogue in the movie was written by him. He was not doing it for a huge amount of money, it was a low-budget picture from the start, but he thought the performance would change things for him, career wise. Trouble was, the producers were shysters, and money ran out before the last weeks. They stopped paying the crew, and a kind of mutiny took place. There's a famous story about the script girl flinging the entire script, with all her notes, into the river. So the ending was not filmed, where it would have been revealed that he did not kill his wife after all, that it was part of his fantasy.
Bob had to sue to receive his final payment, and it wasn't much. In the old Culp house in Beverly Hills (the site of the "Vanity" shoot), there were two posters kept on the wall outside his office, one of Samantha Eggar with a razor blade getting ready to emasculate him and one of him and Sheila making love under water, which we always took to mean that the experience continued to have resonance for him. He said often, "It was the best work I ever did." He also likes to say that he never had more fun in his life, living on the river in the trailer with Sheila, and having his kids visit over the summer. He felt it was the most fun he had with his kids.
So whatever the final product may have looked like, Bob was mostly certainly not forced into making it.
Even though the picture was unfinished, the producers cobbled together what there was of it a couple years later, and snuck it out, where it died without a whisper. Bob and Sheila snuck into the back of a theater in New York to watch it, and they crept away just as quietly. When his kids asked them about it when they got home, Sheila said, "Never mind...."
As an ironic postscript, years later, while Jason was an actor studying at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, he briefly dated Jenna Stern, the daughter of Samantha Egger...