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...
Indeed, w/o knowing the story, one suspected it was unfinished, with the initial scene at the office (utilizing a "POV" shot with Culp's character and dialogue clearly not said by Culp himself) alerting the viewer immediately that trouble was ahead.
One suspects the film might've worked better as a straight ahead spooker, but it's nothing if not ambitious (and garbled!)...I picked it up as a $2.99 dvd at FYE, and a recent spot check shows it is still on the shelves, so don't submit to some exagerrated ebay price for a copy...
Thanks, Mr. BF for your always insightful and informative comments.
As I mentioned earlier, there are 2 versions of the film out there - the "adult" one and the more mainstreamed one that is sometimes aired on cable TV - on AMC or TMC, I think. Both appear to be scotched taped together in bits and pieces .... just go with "hazy, train-of-thought, slightly mystical, and somewhat crazed point-of-view" when viewing either versions to get you through.
As to "He said often, 'It was the best work I ever did.'" Chuang-Tzu, Thomas Luther Price, Frank Boggs and Tatia strongly beg to differ on that one ( ... and add Kelly and Hoby and Trent to that list, too)!!
Thanks a lot MBF for the clarification on the story. Learning that the murder of his wife was part of his fantasizing was very interesting, even if that's not what we see at the end. That would have made the movie much more fascinating to watch! To be honest, I'm not really sure what we see at the very end of what was put together as the film.
I know folks have commented on, at times, Mr. Culp's own personality sometimes getting him in trouble on productions, and perhaps having a somewhat negative impact on his career at times, but on the other hand, it does seem like some bad luck has also continually plagued him throughout the years with various productions: Sheldon Leonard precipitiously cancelling I Spy, the money running out/shysters of "The Grove, Peckinpah's studio break thus ending "Summer Soldiers" possibilities, and so on. To be honest, that makes me feel sad for this amazingly talented man. It seems rather unfair this type of stuff happened all too often in his career, potentially blocking it from being the blockbuster affair it SHOULD have been.
As for the middle part of "Name For Evil" where we, er, see the middle parts, I really have no problem with that aspect of the flick at all.
