As a documentary filmmaker and archivist, I rely on a few critical things when putting together a new film project. The first thing is patience; finding rare and rarely seen materials is often a marathon, not a sprint. The other thing I rely on is the cooperation from and collaboration with the holders of said rare material. Special FX makeup artists, script supervisors, stand-ins, and journalists have been my saving grace on nearly every documentary film project I’ve worked on. For our latest feature length documentary, Pennywise: The Story of IT, there were several people who opened their archives to our team and it was this generosity that really helped us elevate the documentary. One of those people was Bart Mixon, Special FX Makeup Supervisor, and another – and the subject of this article and interview – was Canadian journalist, Steve Newton.
As an entertainment journalist who has been covering music and film for over 40 years, Steve Newton has probably seen it all (and talked to everyone). In terms of film and television, Steve has interviewed some of the most revered names in horror cinema and pop culture: Robert Englund, Jeff Goldblum, Clive Barker, Ozzy Osbourne, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Curry, the list goes on. In 2018, Steve published a coffee table book titled Gord Downie, about the late frontman of Canada’s most popular rock band, the Tragically Hip.
I first met Steve while our team was chin-deep in production on our latest documentary which examines the making and legacy of Stephen King’s 1990 miniseries hit, IT. It was a rare opportunity and a highlight of Steve’s varied career to be the only journalist to visit the set of the miniseries in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Steve’s writing for Fangoria and subsequent audio interview with Tim Curry is nothing short of horror archive gold. He made this material available to our team and in doing so provided us an opportunity to further enhance the quality of the film and ensure that viewers would be in for something really special.
In my recent interview with Steve, we talked about everything from how he broke into the business, some of the other horror film sets he has found himself on, and what it was like to be the only person to interview our beloved Pennywise in the heart of 1990 Derry.
John Campopiano: How did you first get your start in the business of film & music journalism?
Steve Newton: Well, I grew up in the small Canadian town of Chilliwack, British Columbia, about an hour’s drive east of Vancouver, in the Fraser Valley, near the U.S. border. I was born in 1957, so old enough to remember when the Beatles invaded America in 1964, and made their legendary appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. All my spare money went to buying music. I like to say that my friends had nice cars, I had nice records.
I was also fortunate to see newer bands like Kiss, Molly Hatchet, Sammy Hagar, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at a nightclub called the Commodore Ballroom.
Coupled with my love of rock music was a deep interest in horror movies. I distinctly remember being scared spitless as a kid by It! The Terror from Beyond Space. When they discovered that dead guy in the air duct with the black rings around his eyes, that was nightmare material for me. I was also terrified, as a kid, by the witch in The Wizard of Oz. As a youth I would head out to the Chilliwack Drive-in Theatre to see ’70s and ’80s horror and exploitation (grindhouse) flicks whenever I could.
As far as getting into journalism goes, I was studying to get my B.A. at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia, but taking breaks in my early 20s to earn some money working at a food processing plant near Chilliwack. This place was a real hell-hole, and dangerous–I saw one poor guy get crippled when he tried to dislodge some jammed juice cans and got his leg caught in the machinery. Then one day I just got fed up and quit. The next day I went and applied at the local weekly paper, The Chilliwack Progress, and they hired me on as a “stringer”, covering city council meetings and community events. But I also talked them into letting me interview local bands, and that’s where I got my start in music journalism.
The following year, after getting my B.A., I was in a one-year teacher program at UBC, but decided teaching wasn’t for me, so I dropped out. It was the spring of 1982 and I had tickets for a Black Sabbath (with Ronnie James Dio) concert, so on a whim I dropped into the office of the Georgia Straight, a struggling alternative weekly that had been around since 1967. The first person I met there was founder-publisher Dan McLeod, who just happened to be standing around when I walked in. He nixed the idea of my reviewing the Sabbath show that night because at the time all the concerts were covered by somebody else.
After relaying the heartbreaking news about Sabbath, McLeod did mention that he was looking for somebody to cover the then-burgeoning heavy-metal scene, and before long I was on the phone interviewing my heroes in Iron Maiden, Scorpions, and Judas Priest. My journalism career quickly reached its apex when he put my Ozzy Osbourne story on the cover of a June ’82 issue.
About five or six years later I brought my love of horror into the mix when Fangoria magazine made me their Vancouver correspondent, and I started covering local film shoots for them. Around that time I also started reviewing horror movies for the Georgia Straight, and I’ve got well over 300 of them collected on my website, earofnewt.com.
JC: It seems like you’ve spent more time at concerts and in green rooms with musicians than you have on film sets with actors. Are there any differences between interviewing musicians vs. actors?
SN: Interviewing actors was a totally different experience from interviewing musicians, because it usually involved a “set visit”, where you’d show up on a film set and spend several hours there, talking to various actors, directors, producers, and makeup-FX artists. If you were lucky you would get to see something cool being filmed. For a high-profile horror flick like Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan or Halloween: Resurrection or the Stephen King-based Needful Things, Fangoria would often want 3,000 words, so between getting to the set, interviewing everyone, driving home, transcribing the tape, and writing the article, it took a lot of time. I did it more for my love of horror than for the freelance check, which, if I recall, wasn’t all that amazing.
JC: You’re fairly candid on your website about many of the films you covered not being hits. That said, you did interview some of the biggest names in the game, including Jeff Goldblum, Tim Curry, Alicia Silverstone, and Robert Englund. What was it like meeting these icons of the film and TV worlds?
SN: There were some very cool moments involved with meeting those icons. I remember interviewing Jeff Goldblum at the Britannia Mine, off the Sea to Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler, B.C. He was filming an adaptation of Dean Koontz’s novel, Hideaway, and invited me into his trailer and offered me a smoothie, then made a comment about how great my Chicago Black Hawks jacket looked. He was just an awesome fellow. And Alicia Silverstone – I interviewed her for Hideaway as well, but even before that, on Halloween of 1992, I met her in downtown Vancouver where she was filming the thriller, The Crush. I believe that was before she blew up as “the chick in the Aerosmith videos.”. She seemed really with it, and down to earth, for a 16-year-old.
JC: In fact, your encounter with Robert Englund signaled one of several opportunities to cover not just horror feature films, but also horror that was made-for-TV. Walk us through your experience meeting one of the horror genre’s biggest names, Robert Englund.
SN: He was a great guy. I went on the North Vancouver set of the short-lived TV series Nightmare Cafe, where he played the wise-cracking proprietor named Blackie. Though it was executive-produced by terror titan Wes Craven, it wasn’t a horror show so much as a fantasy-comedy. “There’s a lot of banter in it,” Englund told me at the time, “and a lot of quipping. People tend to think of Wes in terms of his horror contributions, but the real Wes Craven fans also know the sense of humor in his work. He has this great sort of surreal comic side too, and in this episode–which is kind of like National Enquirer meets E.T.–he really gets to show that.” I got Englund to autograph an 8-by-10 promo photo of himself from The Phantom of the Opera – he wrote “Happy Halloween Steve!”
JC: Can you talk about some of the more memorable experiences you had reporting from various horror film sets in Vancouver?
SN: Being the only journalist in the world invited to interview Tim Curry on the set of Stephen King’s IT was a highlight. What’s more, having Amanda Plummer and Valerie Bromfield enthusiastically show me around the set constructed for Needful Things was a hoot and hanging with Alien writer Dan O’Bannon on the set of his 1992 Lovecraft flick The Resurrected was also pretty cool. I enjoyed meeting Billy Zane on the set of Dean Koontz’s Sole Survivor in 2000. Other highlights, though not in-person, included doing phone interviews with Max von Sydow (for Needful Things) in 1993, Pam Grier (for the Snoop Dogg-starring, Bones) in 2001, Tom Savini (for the Night of the Living Dead remake) in 1993, and Dean Koontz (for Watchers) in 1988.
JC: Your website serves as a great archive for your extensive work over the years. How long have you been running the site and what are your plans for the future?
SN: I launched the site on Halloween of 2013, and it includes most of the music stories and horror reviews I’ve written as a freelancer over the past 40 years. There’s also a section called “Horror in Vancouver” that includes my Fangoria set visits for films like Deep Rising, Final Destination, and Omen IV. For several years I’ve been digitizing the old interviews that I’ve collected on hundreds of cassettes since 1982 and have been posting those on my Patreon page. I’ve got the full audio of over 300 of my uncut, one-on-one interviews with music legends, from AC/DC to ZZ Top, on there. I intend to add hundreds more interviews to the site.
JC: Speaking of Stephen King’s IT, you generously contributed some of the audio from your interview with Tim Curry to our new documentary. Looking back on it, what was that experience like to meet and speak with both Tim Curry and Bart Mixon, and did you realize at the time what a rare opportunity it was given that you were the only journalist to visit the set of the miniseries?
SN: At the time I had no idea that I would get a “world exclusive” with Tim Curry. I interviewed him on a beautiful day in Vancouver’s Stanley Park in 1990. He was on his lunch break in the makeup tent, wearing the full Pennywise makeup, with makeup-FX artist Bart Mixon standing by to dab at his work and make occasional comments. I remember starting the interview with a faux pas, calling Curry’s clown character “Pennywhistle” instead of Pennywise, and having him correct me. I guess it didn’t help much that, although I was a huge Stephen King fan, I hadn’t actually read It. I’d tried once, but found it too convoluted. I much prefer King’s leaner novels, like Misery and The Dead Zone.
I still have the complete audio of the interview, which has never been published in full, and was hoping that maybe someday it could be used as a “special feature” on an It Blu-ray or something. It’s available for the highest bidder if any film studio or Tim Curry fan wants to purchase it.
And by the way: I’m not afraid of clowns!
You can watch Pennywise: The Story of IT on SCREAMBOX now!
