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by Mike Baronas
Anyone who is serious about genre film knows the name Tim Lucas. His long-running monthly mag Video Watchdog is still popular as ever and his award-winning film critiques have led him to the point of finally being able to complete and release his magnum opus: Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark.
At over 1000 pages that include over 1000 photos (and weighs in at a whopping 12 pounds!), Lucas has created the horror coffee table book to beat. His devotion to Bava is, in a word, astonishing, and his tome oozes with passion and prose. It is the ultimate testament to the late Italian maestro who certainly now has been given his just desserts.
GASP: What triggered your love for Mario Bava?
Tim Lucas: There seemed to be a connection before there was a connection. Whenever I saw his name in print, as in Castle of Frankenstein magazine reviews (which I later learned had been written by Joe Dante), it seemed to jump out at me. When I finally caught up with his movies, they seemed to capture dream states better than any other movies I'd seen, and I couldn't find out anything about him. Many books seemed to disregard everything he made after Black Sunday, which I found incredible and unacceptable. So that curiosity and sense of injustice spurred me on to find out more, more than anything else.
GASP: This is probably an unfair question, but do you have a favorite Bava film?
TL: Kill, Baby... Kill! It was the movie that seduced me into this project, so to speak, and I still find it utterly unlike any horror movie that came before it - a Gothic ghost story with a true metaphysical aspect. And now it ranks with Bay of Blood as probably Bava's most influential picture. All those J-horror movies about spectral little girls wouldn't exist without it.
GASP: How relieved are you that after 30+ years your baby is now completed?
TL: Very relieved, in a sense; but I'm also discovering that it's not really completed, that it's just moving out of me into the larger world. I want to get it into wider circulation, into other languages, and I'm already compiling corrections to the "Stage 1" text.
GASP: You're working on "Stage 1" additions already? Sounds as if you'll never put this project to bed.
TL: Only if people never stop finding corrections! I do consider the project "put to bed," my research done, my book written -- but I would like to think there will be a corrected edition someday, as well as editions in other languages.
GASP: I'm sure there were often times that you wanted to throw in the towel. What kept you going?
TL: I knew that, if I didn't finish the job, Bava's memory would sink into a mire of misinformation and speculation.
GASP: What were some of the most surprising revelations you learned about
Mario as you worked on the book?
TL: It was all a revelation because he was such a mysterious, camera-shy figure when I started my research - analogous in many ways to the comic book artist Steve Ditko. (Bava would have been the perfect director to make a movie of Dr. Strange.)
Perhaps the biggest surprise was discovering that he had a 20-year body of work that predated his supposed first film, Black Sunday, or that he devised all the special effects photography in his own work. I suppose most people think of directors as autocrats who speak mostly to actors and call "action", but Bava really was the rare instance of a complete filmmaker - he did just about everything BUT talk to the actors, whom he hired for their ability to embody character.
 GASP: How were you able to convince Martin Scorsese to write the intro?
TL: He didn't need convincing. He's been a Video Watchdog subscriber since the beginning, and I knew he was a Bava fan and had even met Mario once in 1979. His office even contacted me once to provide some stills of Mario for use in his movie My Voyage in Italy. So I submitted a request to his office and he agreed - contingent upon his approval of the manuscript. His Introduction was in hand a few months after I sent him the first finished draft.
GASP: And who managed to get book's forward by Riccardo Freda written 23 years ago?
TL: I was in contact with Freda, and even spoke to him on the telephone once. He had a reputation as a cold autocrat, but he was never  anything but a gentleman to me. I sent him a letter with questions pertaining to his relationship with Bava and the foreword is basically a translation of what he sent back to me.
GASP: Was it difficult writing a book about an Italian director having never visited Italy for this project yourself?
TL: Not really, because in a sense, it enabled me to better understand Bava personally. He never came to America, and generally travelled very little outside of Rome and it's immediate environs. The more I learned about Bava, the more I realized that we were kindred spirits with many interests and even neuroses in common. I don't think the book lacks anything geographically, anyway, because it was proofread and fact-checked by friends who do live in Rome.
GASP: Have you received any comments about your tome from Lamberto, Roy or other family members?
TL: They received the book today actually. Mario's granddaughter Georgia, who lived with him for a year with her brother Roy when they were children, told me she burst into tears when she opened the package and saw Mario's name on the cover. Her father Lamberto was given his copy of the book by Georgia tonight, and she promises I'll hear from them soon.
GASP: What do you think Mario would think of All the Colors of the Dark?
TL: He used to mock any serious attention his films received, so I think he would have been hugely embarrassed by such a grand gesture of attention... but, inwardly, very pleased. And probably baffled by the devotion of that crazy Americano.
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The author, Tim Lucas, |
and the subject, Mario Bava |
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