Last night's feature was the classic (?) "Teenagers from Outer Space." A low budget film from 1959.
Quick plot line: A team of spacemen arrive on Earth in a space ship. They have been searching the galaxy for a planet suitable to raise their herd of "gargons", a lobster-like (but air-breathing) creature which is a food staple on their homeworld.
The film failed to perform at the box office, placing further stress on an already-burdened Graeff,[ who wrote, directed,edited and produced ] and in the fall of 1959, he suffered a breakdown, proclaimed himself the second coming of Christ.[4] After a number of public appearances followed by a subsequent arrest for disrupting a church service, Graeff disappeared from Hollywood until 1964 and later committed suicide in 1970.
Cost-effective measures
According to Bryan Pearson, the crew employed many guerrilla tactics in order to cut costs. Director Tom Graeff secured the location for Betty Morgan's house for free by posing as a UCLA student (while Graeff had attended the school, he had graduated 5 years earlier). The older woman who owned the house even let the crew use her electricity to power equipment.[2]
Graeff shot in many nearby locations — mostly in the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue — to double as more important city landmarks. Graeff's steady hand and framing kept most of the real locations under-wraps, creating a great low-budget illusion of a small town.
Other cost-cutting ideas didn't pay off as well: the space costumes were simple flight suits clearly decorated with masking tape, dress shoes covered in socks, and surplus Air Force helmets. The use of stock footage in lieu of special effects and Spielbergian "looking" shots replacing actual visuals of the invading enemy spaceships seriously undercut the urgency of the ending. Props included a single bolted-joint skeleton re-used for every dead body, a multichannel mixer that the producers made no attempt to camouflage (even clearly bearing the label "Multichannel Mixer MCM-2") as a piece of alien equipment, and the infamous dime-store Hubley's "Atomic Disintegrator" as the aliens' focusing disintegrator ray.
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