Up Till Now: The Autobiography

and I’m willing to give my life if necessary to see that my country stays free! White! And American!”
    It was an extraordinary speech for anyone to dare give on the steps of the courthouse in a Southern town in 1961. Luckily, as it turned out, two days before we were scheduled to film this scene I came up with a case of laryngitis. This is absolutely true. The doctor told me if I didn’t speak for an entire day my voice might make it through the scene. I didn’t say one word for more than twenty-four hours. If I wanted something I wrote it down. By the next night my throat felt just a little better.
    At dusk that night about three hundred people, mostly farmers, gathered in front of the courthouse. It was a lovely town, the courthouse was on the town square with a beautiful old tree right in front of it. Roger decided that he would begin by shooting the crowd-reaction shots over my shoulder, and to save my voice I shouldn’t say my lines. Instead he read some absolutely innocuous lines to get reaction. Let’s go, Missouri Tigers! We love the St. Louis Cardinals! Let’s hear it for the red, white, and blue! Who wants apple pie! How about that big sale at Sears! When he needed anger he asked those people how they felt about the University of Alabama football team. Roger got that crowd screaming, cheering, pumping their fists, whatever reactions he needed. By midnight most of the crowd had gone home. Being an extra in a movie is fun for about a minute. After the first few hours it gets really boring. So they went home.
    That’s when he shot me doing the real lines. My voice was there and I shouted for them to rage and pillage and burn. The following morning Roger and I were walking down the main street and the publisher of the local newspaper stopped us. He’d stayed the whole night because he was working on a story. “You guys are unbelievable,” he said. “You really did a smart thing.”
    We did? “Darn right. See that tree right there,” he said, pointing to the tree in front of the courthouse. “That’s where they lynched a Negroabout fifteen years ago. A lot of people in that crowd were there. That tree is the symbol of white supremacy ‘round here. Had those people heard what you were saying . . .” He shook his head. “Your picture might’ve had a real different ending.”
    We believed we were in danger every day. We were prevented from shooting certain scenes in the town, Roger received a series of death threats, and the local police and one night even the state militia had to come in to stand guard. We saved the most harrowing scene for the last day. In this scene a long parade of Ku Klux Klansmen in their white hoods drive slowly through the black section of town. The scene takes place at night. We all checked out of the motel and packed our belongings. We shot that scene and just kept driving—all the way to St. Louis.
    The Intruder was a powerful movie, so powerful in fact that Roger had an extremely difficult time finding a distributor. We got great reviews, the Herald-Tribune called it “A major credit to the entire motion picture industry.” The Los Angeles Times wrote that it was “the boldest, most realistic depiction of racial injustice ever shown in American films.” I won several Best Actor awards at film festivals, but the subject was so controversial theater owners were afraid to screen it. It showed in only two theaters in New York City, for example. That was unbelievably frustrating for me. I believe this was the only film Roger Corman ever made that lost money. His next film was The Premature Burial.
    A few years after its initial failure it was re-released under several different exploitation titles, including I Hate Your Guts and Shame. Finally it got some distribution. In England it was released as The Stranger .
    One of the things that made The Intruder considerably different from most of the projects I was doing was that Roger Corman did not promise that this film was going to make me a star. He didn’t even guarantee that I would get paid. At that point in my career it seemed like every phone call I got from a movie director or TV producer or an agent began with the statement, “Bill, honestly, this [fill in the blank] is the one that’s going to make you a star.” Okay, I admitit, I was ready. To me, being a star meant having more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank. It meant security. Gloria had given birth to our second beautiful daughter and