Bert I. Gordon made terrible movies for 60 years. He’s an inspiration

CHICAGO — Bert I. Gordon, who died earlier this spring at 100, was the absolute worst filmmaker who ever lived. Or so some might argue. You’ve heard Ed Wood was the worst. Or Roger Corman. Or maybe Michael Bay. But Gordon was not lousy for one or two decades. He was a terrible filmmaker for about 60 years, and when he got around to writing his memoir in 2010 (“The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.I.G.: An Autobiographical Journey”), it was the absolute worst book ever written by a filmmaker. To borrow from the lurid posters for his movies, his talent, such as it was, screamed: Amazing! Towering! Beyond Description! Just not in a good way. You could say I’m unkind. But there’s poetry to this life: Bert I. Gordon was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, seven years after Orson Welles was born in Kenosha. That’s the universe pranking us.

Or God laughing.

Before his name fades from memory (Gordon died within days of the Oscars this past March, yet somehow didn’t make the in memoriam), before his couple dozen feature films get submerged forever into the digital abyss of YouTube (the best place to catch them today), someone needs to deliver an honest appreciation of the man behind “The Amazing Colossal Man,” “War of the Colossal Beast,” “Attack of the Puppet People,” “Empire of the Ants,” “King Dinosaur,” “Village of the Giants,” “Earth vs. The Spider,” “The Cyclops,” “Picture Mommy Dead” and “Satan’s Princess.”

Because everyone is mediocre at something.

But to be singularly terrible is a feat.

Gordon was so bad at his job that “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ used eight of his films. At times, he seemed to be a veritable co-creator of the cult show. As one of its robot hecklers quipped: The “I.” in Bert I. Gordon probably stood for “I am so ashamed.” In fact, it stood for Ira, and Gordon, to judge by the persistence of his output and total lack of irony in his book, was anything but ashamed of his filmography and abilities. Later in life, he would tell interviewers he was never a fan of MST3K. He believed in his talents.

You’d have to if you made “Beginning of the End.”

As a teenager, on weekends, Gordon would take the train from Kenosha to Chicago, stop for his accordion lessons, then sneak off with a 35 mm still camera into the burlesque shows in the Loop. You know, to get comfortable with making art. Later, after he got a 16 mm film camera for his 16th birthday, his father would drive him to the North Side and ask newsreel companies if they could spare any slivers of unused film.

In his 30s, at his creative peak in 1957, well on his way to drive-in immortality, he made “Beginning of the End,” which plays like a salute to Chicago. It tells the story of mutated grasshoppers that scramble out of Texas into the Midwest. They make fast work of the Illinois National Guard, then Paxton. Then they invade Chicago. Marines arrive. Surely, it’s too cold for grasshoppers in Chicago, a commander asks. (“Not this time of the year,” comes the reply.) Surely, we nuke Chicago now, to save humanity. (“You can’t drop an atom bomb on Chicago,” is the answer.) So, Peter Graves, a decade before starring in TV’s “Mission: Impossible,” hatches a plan: Somebody (just not him) should sit in a PT boat off the coast of Lake Michigan and broadcast a grasshopper mating call, luring the monsters out of the city and drowning them.

It works!

But not before Gordon commits 73 minutes of cinematic faux pas: As Chicago is evacuated, stock footage of Lake Shore Drive shows only a light rush hour. There are images of State Street devoid of anyone (and now reminiscent of the pandemic). Gordon took time to shoot on location in Lincoln Park, asking extras to flee his giant grasshoppers, but the scene is so awkward he appeared to leave in the second before he yelled “OK, now run!” Still, the resulting film shows a knowledge of Chicago geography only a local would appreciate: When monsters attack, they hit the Museum of Science and Industry then head for the Loop.

The thing is, for years Gordon was an independent filmmaker, and even after he worked for MGM and American International Pictures (a drive-in assembly line and home of Roger Corman), he worked cheap. He didn’t have money for any innovative Ray Harryhausen stop-motion (“The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”), so instead of destroying a miniature Chicago, he bought hundreds of grasshoppers and postcards of Chicago landmarks. He had the images blown-up. Then he placed the bugs on the pictures and cut between shots of the military and shots of the bugs crawling over a static image of the Wrigley Building. When the soldiers hit their targets, Gordon would tap the postcard and grasshoppers would fall from the building, so to speak.

It looks as bad as it sounds.

Still, as a child, I loved it and had regular nightmares about giant, jittery grasshoppers. Later, I read an interview with the indie filmmaker John Sayles, who recounted his own sleepless nights after seeing this.

Gordon’s movies were as stone-faced and indelible as a bad dream. They were marked by beach parties and enormous barking canine heads and pale desert expanses and scientists brooding. They were also constructed of ‘50s atomic nightmares and a fear of science run amok. He gave us giant chickens, giant rats, giant spiders, giant wasps, giant cows, giant produce, giant teenagers and a giant named Glenn. (Forrest Ackerman, founder of the monthly mag Famous Monsters of Filmland, inspired by Gordon’s initials, gave him a nickname: “Mr. B.I.G.”)

His movies tended to lose money, but for a period in the late ‘50s through the early ‘60s, he was a minor box office draw, synonymous with drive-ins. By the time I was a kid, he was a UHF channel god and familiar credit on weekend marathons with names like Creature Double Feature.

Now and then Gordon would get a review that admired his imagination and spunk, but he rarely received the serious-minded consideration that directors received. Roger Ebert once found a perfect way to write about Gordon. His review of “The Food of the Gods,” Gordon’s loose H.G. Wells adaptation, doesn’t offer a single outward opinion, just simply describes the plot, pausing only to insert dialogue such as: “When you’re a rat and you suddenly weigh 150 pounds, you have got to learn all over again how to swim!”

As Ebert wrote of another deliriously memorable B-flick (not made by Gordon): When they no longer make movies like this, a little light will go out of the world.

Indeed, though Gordon’s legacy may well be generations of knowingly cheesy flicks like “Sharknado,” the real deal generally comes with sincerity and pride. In his memoir, Gordon remembers his giant grasshoppers looking pretty scary and convincing as they scaled Chicago. Though the book was published only 13 years ago, long into our contemporary age of computer-generated special effects, Gordon wrote that if “Beginning of the End” was made these days: “The live grasshoppers would be ‘filmed’ against a blue or green screen backing, and then, in the computer, combined with the actors’ live-action scenes.”

Oh, Bert. No one ever told you, did they?

He was forever of a generation that still constructed its fantasies by hand, using tangible materials. I don’t note this to be snarky or cruel, but to remind you persistence doesn’t always make room for good sense. It’s a quality shared by the very finest filmmakers of memorable junk: They were unrelenting and doe-eyed. There’s a scene in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” when the director of “Plan 9 From Outer Space” (played by Johnny Depp) is on the phone with a Hollywood executive. We only hear Wood’s side of the conversation: “Really? Worst movie you ever saw? Well, my next one will be better!” Gordon, like Wood, made movies because he had to. Nothing slowed him. He just happened to be bad at it. Not that he wasn’t warned repeatedly: Gordon once said a friend told him he had no business writing screenplays. A Universal executive, upon meeting him, told him, gently, to go back to the Midwest, immediately. Gordon wrote in his book: “There wasn’t one friend or relative” who supported his dream of moving to Los Angeles and being a filmmaker.

Did Bert I. Gordon listen?

We would be poorer if he had.

We wouldn’t have “The Cyclops,” in which a woman searches for her vanished fiance, only to find he has become a 30-foot-tall cyclops on a deserted island. We wouldn’t have “Earth vs. The Spider,” which promises armageddon only to deliver a bug that never makes it beyond New Mexico. Gordon, who was enamored with the carnival barkers and freak shows that visited Kenosha each summer, once shot a movie in “Perceptovision,” which was not a real thing. He made “King Dinosaur” using a cast of four and a live iguana for the title monster. When his salad days slowed in the mid-60s, he tried children’s movies, police procedurals, sex comedies. He didn’t direct his final movie (“Secrets of a Psychopath”) until he was 93.

It was not an inconsequential career. You probably know some of his movies even if you haven’t seen one: “The Amazing Colossal Man” alone (his biggest hit) left some of our most recycled images of midcentury black-and-white kitsch. Not to mention, its story of a man caught in a nuclear blast who goes mad and grows large, sounds suspiciously like Marvel’s Hulk, created not soon after.

A little political trivia: Alfred C. Baldwin III, a lookout for the Watergate burglars, was so engrossed by a TV showing Gordon’s “Attack of the Puppet People,” he failed to notice the police on the scene until it was too late. (“Attack of the Puppet People” itself, about a toy-maker whose dolls plot an escape, even plays like a precursor to “Toy Story.”)

Gordon also worked with real actors — Ron Howard, Joan Collins, Ida Lupino, Beau Bridges — though usually at the start or a low point in a career. In 1972, he even came full circle and cast homie Orson Welles as a cult leader who raises the dead in “Necromancy.” While they were shooting, Gordon was instructed by Welles’ entourage: Never ever mention “Citizen Kane” or even say the words “Citizen Kane.”

That was probably wise.

What Gordon offered was not exactly filmmaking, but, in retrospect, something like the raw materials of our cultural future. He was not stylish, clever or original; shooting low to the ground so a monster looks big was his signature move. But he left blueprints for Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron and others to flesh out. His was an imagination on a tight budget, primed for a Cold War ecosystem of drive-ins, horror comics and nuclear nightmares. As we head into a new summer movie season, remember Bert I. Gordon. If you have ever doubted your own talents, be inspired. He really did think those grasshoppers looked scary.