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10 Things We Learned On the Set Of “From Dusk Till Dawn!”

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From Dusk Till Dawn

Back in May, Robert Rodriguez’s new(ish) television network El Rey treated Bloody-Disgusting to a day on the set of the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series. Filming took place in a private studio in Austin, TX, and the episode that I was able to see shooting was Episode 207, titled “Bring Me The Head Of Santánico Pandemonium.” I, unfortunately, had not watched a single episode of the show so I spent the night before the visit binging the entire first season. I really love my job.

After arriving on set, I was ushered along with the rest of the press to the area where filming was happening. It had been raining most of the week (we had some sort of strange monsoon season here in Austin that month) so shooting the scene was delayed a little. While we all waited for the crew to set up the scene, we were able to talk to Jeff Fahey, who plays the Gecko brothers’ Uncle Eddie, a new character in the second season. As Fahey finished up answering our questions,  we were called back to the set.

The scene being filmed was a fight scene between newly transformed Culebra Richie Gecko (Zane Holtz), Santánico Pandemonium (Eiza González) and The Regulator (new cast member Danny Trejo). Unfortunately, all of the filming involved stunt doubles, so we didn’t get to see the actual actors in action. That being said, it was quite nerve-wracking watching them try to get the fight choreography just right before the squibs went off, for if it went wrong they would have to take the time to clean up before they could shoot the scene again. I have a lot of respect for stunt actors, because they put in a lot of hard work without much of the credit.

Once the scene wrapped, we were able to grab lunch with the entire cast and crew of From Dusk Till Dawn and have a sort of casual interview with the cast members, including Eiza González, Zane Holtz, DJ Cotrona (Seth Gecko) & Danny Trejo. It was a refreshing change of scenery, as interviews are typically a bit more formal. With this setting, we basically got to go on a group date with the cast. Below are some of the best pieces of information we found out while on the set!*

*Some of the following quotes also come from my interview with additional cast members Madison Davenport (Kate Fuller), Brandon Soo Hoo (Scott Fuller), Jake Busey (Professor Tanner/Sex Machine), Wilmer Valderrama (Carlos), Robert Rodriguez and showrunner Carlos Coto at the From Dusk Till Dawn press conference at the ATX Television Festival on June 7th, 2015.

1. There Will Be A Lot More Action & Gore

It’s no secret that the first season of From Dusk Till Dawn took a few episodes to really get going (they didn’t arrive at the Titty Twister until the end of episode 5), so now that we’ve reached the end of the story that the movie told, the writers can really branch out with new stories and action set pieces. In Danny Trejo’s own words: “It takes four Bs to make a good show: Babes, bombs, bullets and blood. We’ve got all of it.” If that isn’t enough to sell you, I don’t know what will!

2. It’s The “Official” Sequel To The Movie

The second season pretty much ended where the movie ended, albeit with more people left alive (Richie, Santánico, Scott, etc.). There isn’t a blueprint for the season anymore and the writers had to come up with completely new material for the story. “Everything is a surprise because there’s nothing to go off of anymore…it definitely feels like the sequel” Holtz said. I asked Robert Rodriguez if he viewed the second season as an official sequel to the movie, he said “the first season was about re-telling the movie in a new way in order to open up the story to new possibilities for future seasons…in the movie we killed off pretty much everyone, but we changed that for the show so that we could take these characters on a new journey. This is where the fun really begins.”

3. Expect The Unexpected

Mexican actress Eiza González (who was in full makeup as the vampire version of Santánico when I interviewed her) was extremely excited about this second season.”Fans are going to be very excited…..it goes in a direction that I wasn’t expecting, and I don’t think the audience will expect it either,” she said.

4. Sex Machine/Professor Tanner (Jake Busey) Will Be Back!

I was a little confused when I saw Jake Busey at the press conference, considering his character died at the end of the first season at the hands of Gonzalez (Jesse Garcia). “We don’t do interviews without Jake Busey,” joked Davenport (Kate). While Busey could not detail the specifics of his return, he did mention that “death is definitely something that is open to interpretation on this show.”

5. Santánico Will Be An Even Bigger Badass

“Santánico gets much more baddass this season…she gets taken out of the [Titty] Twister for the first time in centuries….we get to learn a lot about her backstory,” explained González. Since she is paired with Richie, there will probably be plenty of mayhem that they get themselves into this season.

6. Richie Will Learn How To Be A Culebra

“You’ll see Richie struggling with the pros and cons of being a Culebra…he still kind of has rules and morals about who he will kill,” Holtz said. Santánico is “coaching me on the lifestyle of being a Culebra…she’s on sort of a revenge path this season and using me to help her achieve that goal. She teaches me how these Culebra figureheads all interact and operate.”

7. Danny Trejo’s “The Regulator” Will Be A Force To Be Reckoned With

The Regulator was a role that Rodriguez wrote specifically for Trejo. “I regulate, I don’t negotiate,” Trejo said on his new character. “When The Regulator is after you, just pack your bags because you’re going home…The fact that he came back from the dead makes him a little more than Dog the Bounty Hunter.” Surely this character can’t be invincible, though. On his character’s weakness, Trejo did let us in on this little secret: “You can’t kill him unless you kill him with his own gun.”

From Dusk Till Dawn

From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, for El Rey Network and Miramax. Danny Trejo as The Regulator.

8. Uncle Eddie Will Play An Integral Role

Jeff Fahey’s Uncle Eddie is a new character this season, and might be stirring up some trouble for the brothers. “Uncle Eddie raised the brothers when their father passed away,” Fahey said. “He’s a little misunderstood by elements of the law.” There is a rift between the brothers this season, since they were separated in the finale of season one. “The brothers are only complete with Uncle Eddie. Without me, they are only part of the whole,” Fahey said. “It’s an intricate character within the arc of this season.”

9. Practical Jokes On Set Were Common

After recounting a sequence where Cotrona screwed up a shot where he and Davenport were supposed to have been sprayed with blood (he ducked out of the shot at the last second, leaving Davenport to be the only one sprayed), they got it right the second time and decided to walk to the convenience store across the street (still covered in fake blood), while Rodriguez followed them with a camera. They completely freaked out the clerk, who thought they had just come in from murdering somebody (they later came in and told him it was fake blood).

10. Machete Kills In Space Is Definitely Happening!

Trejo had to be rushed back to the set to continue filming, but I managed to squeeze in a last-minute question regarding the second Machete sequel. When asked about the status of the film, Trejo said “We have got Machete in Space in the works! It’s going to be different…something that you’ve never seen…It will definitely be in space though…James Bond went to space? Machete changes it.” Word on the street is that they will be filming later this year, though this was left unconfirmed by Trejo.

“From Dusk Till Dawn” premieres on Tuesday August 25th on El Rey Network, but is currently available from many OnDemand providers.

A journalist for Bloody Disgusting since 2015, Trace writes film reviews and editorials, as well as co-hosts Bloody Disgusting's Horror Queers podcast, which looks at horror films through a queer lens. He has since become dedicated to amplifying queer voices in the horror community, while also injecting his own personal flair into film discourse. Trace lives in Austin, TX with his husband and their two dogs. Find him on Twitter @TracedThurman

Interviews

“I Don’t See Retiring from This” – Joe Bob Briggs Talks New “Last Drive-In” Format and the Show’s Future [Interview]

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Hey everybody, have you heard the news? Joe Bob is back in town!

The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs has returned for its sixth season on Shudder. While the show’s format has been slightly revised adopting a new biweekly schedule with one film instead of a double feature the beloved horror host’s approach is much the same.

“It didn’t really change anything,” Briggs tells Bloody Disgusting. “We were crowding all of our movies into 10 weeks once a year and then having specials, and we found that people would rather have more weeks. It’s actually more movies than we had before.

“And some of the people on the East coast fall asleep in the second movie,” he laughs. “It’s about a five-hour show when it’s a double feature because we talk so much. Also, it’s hard to get thematic double features every single time. So our specials are still double features, but our regular episodes are single features.”

The season kicked off last week with The Last Drive-In Live: A Tribute to Roger Corman, celebrating the legendary filmmaker’s first 70 years in Hollywood with a double feature of 1959’s A Bucket of Blood and 1983’s Deathstalker. The special was filmed live in front of a fervent audience of Briggs’ fan base lovingly dubbed the Mutant Family at Joe Bob’s Drive-In Jamboree in Las Vegas last October.

In addition to his usual hosting duties, Briggs conducted a career-spanning interview with Corman and his wife, fellow producer Julie Corman. They were also joined by one of Corman’s oldest friends and collaborators, Bruce Dern. In a heartfelt moment of mutual admiration, Briggs and Corman exchanged lifetime achievement awards on hubcaps.

“I’ve known Roger for about 35 years, so I’ve only known him for half of his career,” Briggs chuckles. In his long history of reviewing, interviewing, and talking about Corman and his legendary work, one emblematic encounter sticks out to Briggs.

“I remember the very first time I went to the Corman studio, which was a lumber yard on Venice Boulevard. He had a standing set for a spaceship control room, a standing set for a strip club, and I think he had one other one, and then he had all of his editing facilities there, but it was still a lumber yard. They had not really changed any of the buildings or anything.

“He’s showing me around the studio, and we were walking past a pile of debris, and I said, ‘Roger, is that the mutant from Forbidden World?’ It had just been thrown over in a corner. And he just said, ‘Yes, Joe Bob, I believe that is. He was apparently no longer needed.’ I said, ‘Roger, you gotta get with it! That stuff is worth money.’ But he was like, ‘When the movie’s over, the movie’s over.’ That was Roget to a T.”

At least part of Corman’s longevity can be attributed to his shrewd business practices and pragmatic approach to the industry, which has included working in every conceivable genre of cinema. “I couldn’t think of a single genre he has not made,” Briggs says.

“When we did this interview at the Jamboree, I said, ‘I’m gonna name the genre, and you tell me what you love about that genre,’ and every comment that he made involved money and box office performance,” he snickers. “None of it was involved with love of cinema, although I did get him to say that his favorite genre is a genre that he didn’t dabble in much other than his first movie [1954’s Highway Dragnet], and that was film noir.”

While the fourth annual Drive-In Jamboree is still in the planning stage, Briggs is delighted by the event’s continued success. “The Jamboree is something that we literally just threw together. We’ve had three of them now. It’s something where we just show up and try to come up with programming for each day.

But I really think the Jamboree is more about the mutant family meeting the mutant family. It’s more about people who know each other online gathering and partying with each other in person. It’s not so much about what movies we have. I mean, we always have an anniversary movie, and we always have some special guests and everything, but it’s more about the gathering of the mutants. It’s fun from that point of view. They’re exhausting, I can tell you that.”

The zeal among Briggs’ audience has only grown over the years, from hosting Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel from 1986 to 1996, to MonsterVision on TNT from 1996 to 2000, and The Last-Drive-In on Shudder since 2018. “I’m amazed, having been in the business for this many years, that I still have a show at this time, because they say you can’t repeat TV,” Briggs notes.

“Nobody wants to see old TV, and yet I’ve done the same show three times on three different networks, and every time I try to change it everyone says, ‘No, no, don’t change it! That’s the part we love.’ I always want to do something new, and I’m always told, ‘No, you’re the CEO of Coca Cola who went to New Coke.’ You can’t do that. People will revolt. So we’re still doing it.

“It’s one of the few shows that I know of that’s just sort of grown organically over, gosh, almost 40 years. We’ve just added elements to the show. We try things. If something doesn’t work, we throw it away. If something works, we do it forever!”

The mutant family will be happy to know that Briggs plans to continue hosting and writing about movies for as long as he’s able to. “I don’t see retiring from this or retiring from writing. I’m primarily a writer, and the good thing about writing is long after they don’t wanna see you on TV anymore you can still write.

“The difference today, though, is I was pretty much the only guy doing genre films when I started. Now, there are academics that do it. There are entire books written about Dario Argento and Tobe Hooper and even lesser names than those, and there are, of course, a massive number of websites, including your own, so that when something comes out today, there’s immediately a hundred reviews of it; whereas in 1982, I was sort of the only guy, because the movies were considered disposable trash. So I have been surpassed in my deep knowledge, because who can keep up with all that? It’s impossible!”

Diana Prince, who serves as Briggs’ co-host Darcy the Mail Girl and was instrumental in getting him back in the hosting chair, has been promoted to an associate producer this season. “She was sort of always the associate producer, but I guess they finally gave her the title,” Briggs explains.

“Diana Prince is in on all the decisions about programming. I always listen to Austin Jennings, the director, and Diana Prince, the mail girl, because they come from opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what kind of movies they wanna watch, and we try to strike a balance between. You know, she’s not gonna vote for Possession, and he’s not gonna vote for Mountaintop Motel Massacre,” he chortles.

“They’re probably the principal advisors, as far as what we show. Of course, [Diana] has a lot of social media clout, and she’s extremely knowledgeable about pop culture. Wow! She has seen everything. She’s seen more than I’ve seen!”

While surprises are part of the fun of The Last Drive-In, Briggs previews some of what’s in store this season. “The place we normally live is the neglected ’80 slasher, and we still live there,” he assures. “But we’re gonna pay a lot more attention to the ’70s especially. I’ve always thought the ’70s are more interesting than the ’80s anyway. And we’re gonna pay attention to some really recent stuff.”

He teases, “We’re gonna bring back Joe Bob’s Summer School, which is something that we used to do at MonsterVision. And we may have a marathon. There’s a possibility of that. But I’ll be digging this new format of being on every other week between now and at least up to Labor Day.”

While Briggs’ hosting format hasn’t changed much across four decades, the world around him certainly has and that’s why The Last Drive-In remains relevant. He points out, “In the era of streaming, where everything is menus and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of choices, we are that thing called a curator that can direct you to the fun places on the spectrum of streaming.

“Streaming is very confusing for people, and a lot of people don’t like it for that reason. I hope what we’re doing is cutting through the weeds and bringing things into perspective. And, you know, it’s just more fun to watch a movie with us!” he concludes with a Texas-sized grin.

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