Revenge of the Cheerleaders is a film like many others --it does, after all, contain naked pom-pom girls, big dumb jocks, locker rooms, shower scenes, and knuckle-footed dance numbers--and yet it ranks among the most unique experiences in cinema.There is the remarkable opening scene, in which a robust, mixed-race squadron of pep-squad beauties change outfits in a moving convertible on what is plainly an open street in a residential neighborhood. And then there is exploitation goddess Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith -- moviedom's cheerleader supreme -- playing a hugely pregnant high-school babe while she is also quite visibly about eight-and-a-half months into her own pre-natal term (the occupant of Rainbeaux's sexily swollen belly, her real-life baby Justin, makes a post-credits cameo in mom's arms). Plus there are those extravagant dance numbers, in which the participants' moves bear no relation to what plays on the soundtrack. And last and, yeah, probably least, there is David Hasselhoff. As "Boner."Reckless, madcap, amphetamine-paced, and unforgettable, Revenge of the Cheerleaders has long since passed from vintage drive-in grist to beloved cult status. The film was directed by Richard Lerner, who had previously photographed Revenge's predecessor, the groundbreaking The Cheerleaders (1972). Recently, Mr. Lerner was kind enough to discuss his classic with Mr. Skin.
Did you make films before The Cheerleaders?
Yeah, I did four shorts. My first one was a horror film called I Can't Wake Up. It had no dialogue and it had classical music--Bartok and Stravinsky. It was a lot of fun. We just did it in my mother's apartment.
My father had a magazine 16mm camera, and I just couldn't stop playing with it. I made a short about a lawyer taking a bubble bath, called Fat Tub. A five-minute film made in one afternoon. We took a Woody Woodpecker record and played it at slow speed. I made an abstract ice-skating film in Central Park using Django Reinhardt as the soundtrack. And I made a seventy-minute feature with the guy who played the principal in Revenge of the Cheerleaders, William Thomas Marshall. It's called Stop Motion. It's probably the best thing I ever did.
At some point you got hooked up with Paul Glickler, who directed The Cheerleaders. He said that you had filmed one other feature together before Hot Circuit.
Yeah, I was [cinematographer.] It was shot in a weekend.
Tell us about making The Cheerleaders.
Obviously, it was all new to us. It was pretty ambitious. We had a short shooting schedule. It was very exciting to actually be shooting a 35mm film that probably a lot of people would see. To be using actors. It's so important casting, getting good people.
We cast the parts in L.A. Looking at three hundred girls naked in one weekend was amazing. I felt like I was in a butcher's shop.
We didn't know how successful it would be. Everyone wanted a sequel. Paul didn't really want to do it. We wanted to do something different.
You did direct the sequel, though--Revenge of the Cheerleaders. How was that?
I think we had a bigger production on Revenge of the Cheerleaders. We had a SAG cast. Probably a bigger crew.
I think we shot seven days, then fired two cheerleaders. One of the requirements was that the women, the cheerleaders, would obviously have to do nudity. That's obviously part of the marketplace for this film. And two of them wouldn't do it at a certain point. We ran out of money after seven days so it was convenient to let them go. Then we hired a new one, Helen Lang (Picture: - - ), who certainly had no problem doing nudity.
Why would someone sign on for a movie like this unless they were somewhat gung-ho about doing nudity?
Just to get a role. People will do anything to get a role. A 35mm feature--why not? But to lie like that is pretty bad.
Patrice Rohmer (Picture: - - - ), the blonde that does nudity all the time, she was obviously so free and easy, she was perfect. She was supposed to be a hippy cheerleader. That was a big reason to hire her. It wasn't so much her credits; she was just so open. She had a positive point of view. It helped the film so much.
What did the final budget end up being?
I think a little shy of $300,000.
There appears to be an unused scene with David Hasselhoff and Patrice Rohmer getting into a tent.
Yeah, there was a scene where they're supposed to be smoking a joint. There are quite a few things we didn't use, like any film. The rough cut wasn't that long; it just wasn't working.
The second editor we got [was] Dick Brummer, who'd cut a lot of Russ Meyer films. He kind of understood the genre better than we did. He made everything more high-energy. Norman Gaye was the original editor; he was listed as somebody else. He has edited on The Exorcist. He was used to a high budget, dramatic feature, which this film was not.
Did Brummer come up with some of the wacky sound effects?
Yeah. He's worked in sound editing. We had some sound editing done, but I think he did that. He did the voices for the MOS stuff too. That one scene with Hartlander and his assistant in the limousine talking about Park 'N' Lark, that was shot with the second camera crew by Nick [Nathaniel Dorsky] without any dialogue. It was all dubbed in later. We were shooting the basketball game at the same time.
Let's talk about the very first shot in the film: You've got six cheerleaders in a convertible changing their clothes on what looks like a residential street.
That was Beverly Hills. We just did it. It was pretty risky. Someone said that Natalie Wood drove by while this was happening. You can see the two that were fired were sort of hiding their nudity.
There's a lot of music and musical numbers. Was that always part of the concept?
I've always loved music. When you put the music on a film it's like having dessert. John Sterling did a really good job. He was Cheryl ["Rainbeaux" Smith]'s boyfriend and Justin, the baby's, father. I must have met him through her.
We didn't rehearse the film very much, but we rehearsed the dancing a lot, and the cheer routines. We never rehearsed the actual movie. [Chuckles.]
What music were they actually dancing to on the set?
I think Ohio Players. "Skintight." The dance in the parking lot was on Santa Monica Boulevard right in the heart of West Hollywood. It was a lumberyard. Those were the soul days.
One of the most memorable aspects of the film is that Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith's (Picture: - - ) character is pregnant -- as she so hugely was during filming. Let's talk about that.
We knew that right away; it wasn't any surprise. Actually we cast her and didn't realize she was pregnant. Then we said, "The hell with it. We'll use it." We definitely wanted her. She had an angelic face. We really wanted to compliment the look of the five--initially six--women. We had one black one, one Asian, two blondes . . . almost like a little United Nations. That was really important. The film was so integrated already. There were a lot of blacks at Aloha [High.]
Jerii Woods gets top billing.
I didn't know that.
I wondered if that was based on contractual negotiations or a line count of dialogue.
I have no idea. She was very dedicated and extremely hard working. It may have just been chance.
And if someone had told you then that one of the young cast members was going to star in a couple of huge TV shows, would you have been able to guess the identity?
No. The interesting thing is that David Hasselhoff was one of the few straight males in the film. A lot of the males were either gay or bisexual, from CalArts. There weren't that many available straight male actors [in that age range.]
Initially when you said "straight," I thought maybe you meant drug-free.
[Drug experimentation] was definitely a part of the culture. It was much more important in those days. It was part of the lifestyle.
Freddy Gray, the class clown, I'm sure he was [heterosexual.] He was the only one who really improvised. He juiced up the film a lot. He used the script, but he went way beyond it.
He has the only serious scene in the film, after the cheerleaders are fired.
That was the big debate about whether to leave that scene in or not. We just felt it made the film a little more human. The film is so cartoonish as it is.
Revenge of the Cheerleaders is what I hoped high school would be like. It's like a fantasy situation where there are no repercussions.
The drug scene had happened in the '60s but it had carried over. It was just an amoral high school. Obviously it's not believable, but it made the film more fun. I didn't know how extreme you could be. If I'd known, I would have been more extreme in terms of [using] the broadest takes.
Did you have to make any concessions for an "R" rating?
No. We had very brief simulated sex scenes. Not like in The Cheerleaders.
Monarch released the film?
At one point, Columbia was interested in it. Some of the studios were interested in exploitation films as they were called. They dropped out and Alan Shackleton, who we had known previously--at least we knew he was basically an honest guy--distributed it. It was mainly a drive-in film. His ad campaign was absolutely terrible.
I never saw it on TV. We made a PG-13 version of it that has a better catfight in it. We had other outtakes we used. [The catfight] was when the cheerleaders raided Lincoln [High]. They really go at each other.
When Jerii Woods has the fire extinguisher and the beret, was that meant as sort of a Patty Hearst reference?
No, I never thought of it that way! I never really liked that scene because it's so unbelievable. I'm told it doesn't matter.
That really seemed absurd! But at the time we did it, it didn't seem absurd at all. When I look at it now, I get a little embarrassed by that scene.
Did the script go through many drafts?
Nick Dorsky did a lot. Then his friend Ted Greenwald, who's a poet, worked out a lot of the dialogue. "You bees lose your honey?" I was more involved in the story than the dialogue, and [with] producing it. We wanted to have our own fantasy high school and somehow show a lot of nudity and sex and carry it as far as we could go.
The scene with Susie Elene and "Jordan" in the restaurant takes it to a whole other level.
They were an item. They were a couple. And Patrice Rohmer and David Hasselhoff were a couple. So that made it much easier. She really liked David.
There seem to be romantic pairings in the context of the plot as well, and yet that never seems to stop them from going from guy to guy with absolutely no hurt feelings, ever. I think that makes Revenge of the Cheerleaders almost unique in cinema.
You mean there's no jealousy. Yeah. Not in this film. No, the idea--it's part of the myth--the cheerleaders are just love-machines. The Boy Scout comes along and they just. . . . There are no relationships in the film, really. I think that's what's actually good about it. The character actors sort of hold the film together. They have the real acting talent. [Eddra Gale,] Bramley, Regina Gleason, Carl Ballantine.
Talk about some of the other stuff that was left out of the final film.
One thing about Revenge of the Cheerleaders: We didn't have a distributor. I forget what the story was with Cinemation; they were going bankrupt. That's one reason this film is so unique. We knew we had to have nudity and sex, but other than that we just did what we wanted to do.
In the alternate version, in the last scene, there was this whole ecology thing going on at that time--'73, '74. So that party was really about recycling garbage. And there was a romantic scene between Tishi and Hall Walker where he talks about his war experiences. That was taken out. This is in the PG-13 version.
We do have these other sequences. Still, the "R" version is the best version. There is a swimming-pool scene with a swimming coach and the girls are all lined up on these podiums. It's kind of corny but we used that in the PG version too. Rainbeaux [Cheryl Smith] -- you see her pregnant belly -- she's wearing a bikini.
What have you been working on recently?
I did a documentary on Jack Kerouac, What Happened to Kerouac? Nick Dorsky wound up being the editor. I'm in the diamond business and fool around with video. I wrote a science-fiction script, but it's too expensive to produce.
You keep an "I CHEER" license plate on your shelf.
Yeah, from many years ago. It almost is a little too much to have that because everyone will drive up next to you and say, "I cheer too!"
Did you make films before The Cheerleaders?
Yeah, I did four shorts. My first one was a horror film called I Can't Wake Up. It had no dialogue and it had classical music--Bartok and Stravinsky. It was a lot of fun. We just did it in my mother's apartment.
My father had a magazine 16mm camera, and I just couldn't stop playing with it. I made a short about a lawyer taking a bubble bath, called Fat Tub. A five-minute film made in one afternoon. We took a Woody Woodpecker record and played it at slow speed. I made an abstract ice-skating film in Central Park using Django Reinhardt as the soundtrack. And I made a seventy-minute feature with the guy who played the principal in Revenge of the Cheerleaders, William Thomas Marshall. It's called Stop Motion. It's probably the best thing I ever did.
At some point you got hooked up with Paul Glickler, who directed The Cheerleaders. He said that you had filmed one other feature together before Hot Circuit.
Yeah, I was [cinematographer.] It was shot in a weekend.
Tell us about making The Cheerleaders.
Obviously, it was all new to us. It was pretty ambitious. We had a short shooting schedule. It was very exciting to actually be shooting a 35mm film that probably a lot of people would see. To be using actors. It's so important casting, getting good people.
We cast the parts in L.A. Looking at three hundred girls naked in one weekend was amazing. I felt like I was in a butcher's shop.
We didn't know how successful it would be. Everyone wanted a sequel. Paul didn't really want to do it. We wanted to do something different.
You did direct the sequel, though--Revenge of the Cheerleaders. How was that?
I think we had a bigger production on Revenge of the Cheerleaders. We had a SAG cast. Probably a bigger crew.
I think we shot seven days, then fired two cheerleaders. One of the requirements was that the women, the cheerleaders, would obviously have to do nudity. That's obviously part of the marketplace for this film. And two of them wouldn't do it at a certain point. We ran out of money after seven days so it was convenient to let them go. Then we hired a new one, Helen Lang (Picture: - - ), who certainly had no problem doing nudity.
Why would someone sign on for a movie like this unless they were somewhat gung-ho about doing nudity?
Just to get a role. People will do anything to get a role. A 35mm feature--why not? But to lie like that is pretty bad.
Patrice Rohmer (Picture: - - - ), the blonde that does nudity all the time, she was obviously so free and easy, she was perfect. She was supposed to be a hippy cheerleader. That was a big reason to hire her. It wasn't so much her credits; she was just so open. She had a positive point of view. It helped the film so much.
What did the final budget end up being?
I think a little shy of $300,000.
There appears to be an unused scene with David Hasselhoff and Patrice Rohmer getting into a tent.
Yeah, there was a scene where they're supposed to be smoking a joint. There are quite a few things we didn't use, like any film. The rough cut wasn't that long; it just wasn't working.
The second editor we got [was] Dick Brummer, who'd cut a lot of Russ Meyer films. He kind of understood the genre better than we did. He made everything more high-energy. Norman Gaye was the original editor; he was listed as somebody else. He has edited on The Exorcist. He was used to a high budget, dramatic feature, which this film was not.
Did Brummer come up with some of the wacky sound effects?
Yeah. He's worked in sound editing. We had some sound editing done, but I think he did that. He did the voices for the MOS stuff too. That one scene with Hartlander and his assistant in the limousine talking about Park 'N' Lark, that was shot with the second camera crew by Nick [Nathaniel Dorsky] without any dialogue. It was all dubbed in later. We were shooting the basketball game at the same time.
Let's talk about the very first shot in the film: You've got six cheerleaders in a convertible changing their clothes on what looks like a residential street.
That was Beverly Hills. We just did it. It was pretty risky. Someone said that Natalie Wood drove by while this was happening. You can see the two that were fired were sort of hiding their nudity.
There's a lot of music and musical numbers. Was that always part of the concept?
I've always loved music. When you put the music on a film it's like having dessert. John Sterling did a really good job. He was Cheryl ["Rainbeaux" Smith]'s boyfriend and Justin, the baby's, father. I must have met him through her.
We didn't rehearse the film very much, but we rehearsed the dancing a lot, and the cheer routines. We never rehearsed the actual movie. [Chuckles.]
What music were they actually dancing to on the set?
I think Ohio Players. "Skintight." The dance in the parking lot was on Santa Monica Boulevard right in the heart of West Hollywood. It was a lumberyard. Those were the soul days.
One of the most memorable aspects of the film is that Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith's (Picture: - - ) character is pregnant -- as she so hugely was during filming. Let's talk about that.
We knew that right away; it wasn't any surprise. Actually we cast her and didn't realize she was pregnant. Then we said, "The hell with it. We'll use it." We definitely wanted her. She had an angelic face. We really wanted to compliment the look of the five--initially six--women. We had one black one, one Asian, two blondes . . . almost like a little United Nations. That was really important. The film was so integrated already. There were a lot of blacks at Aloha [High.]
Jerii Woods gets top billing.
I didn't know that.
I wondered if that was based on contractual negotiations or a line count of dialogue.
I have no idea. She was very dedicated and extremely hard working. It may have just been chance.
And if someone had told you then that one of the young cast members was going to star in a couple of huge TV shows, would you have been able to guess the identity?
No. The interesting thing is that David Hasselhoff was one of the few straight males in the film. A lot of the males were either gay or bisexual, from CalArts. There weren't that many available straight male actors [in that age range.]
Initially when you said "straight," I thought maybe you meant drug-free.
[Drug experimentation] was definitely a part of the culture. It was much more important in those days. It was part of the lifestyle.
Freddy Gray, the class clown, I'm sure he was [heterosexual.] He was the only one who really improvised. He juiced up the film a lot. He used the script, but he went way beyond it.
He has the only serious scene in the film, after the cheerleaders are fired.
That was the big debate about whether to leave that scene in or not. We just felt it made the film a little more human. The film is so cartoonish as it is.
Revenge of the Cheerleaders is what I hoped high school would be like. It's like a fantasy situation where there are no repercussions.
The drug scene had happened in the '60s but it had carried over. It was just an amoral high school. Obviously it's not believable, but it made the film more fun. I didn't know how extreme you could be. If I'd known, I would have been more extreme in terms of [using] the broadest takes.
Did you have to make any concessions for an "R" rating?
No. We had very brief simulated sex scenes. Not like in The Cheerleaders.
Monarch released the film?
At one point, Columbia was interested in it. Some of the studios were interested in exploitation films as they were called. They dropped out and Alan Shackleton, who we had known previously--at least we knew he was basically an honest guy--distributed it. It was mainly a drive-in film. His ad campaign was absolutely terrible.
I never saw it on TV. We made a PG-13 version of it that has a better catfight in it. We had other outtakes we used. [The catfight] was when the cheerleaders raided Lincoln [High]. They really go at each other.
When Jerii Woods has the fire extinguisher and the beret, was that meant as sort of a Patty Hearst reference?
No, I never thought of it that way! I never really liked that scene because it's so unbelievable. I'm told it doesn't matter.
That really seemed absurd! But at the time we did it, it didn't seem absurd at all. When I look at it now, I get a little embarrassed by that scene.
Did the script go through many drafts?
Nick Dorsky did a lot. Then his friend Ted Greenwald, who's a poet, worked out a lot of the dialogue. "You bees lose your honey?" I was more involved in the story than the dialogue, and [with] producing it. We wanted to have our own fantasy high school and somehow show a lot of nudity and sex and carry it as far as we could go.
The scene with Susie Elene and "Jordan" in the restaurant takes it to a whole other level.
They were an item. They were a couple. And Patrice Rohmer and David Hasselhoff were a couple. So that made it much easier. She really liked David.
There seem to be romantic pairings in the context of the plot as well, and yet that never seems to stop them from going from guy to guy with absolutely no hurt feelings, ever. I think that makes Revenge of the Cheerleaders almost unique in cinema.
You mean there's no jealousy. Yeah. Not in this film. No, the idea--it's part of the myth--the cheerleaders are just love-machines. The Boy Scout comes along and they just. . . . There are no relationships in the film, really. I think that's what's actually good about it. The character actors sort of hold the film together. They have the real acting talent. [Eddra Gale,] Bramley, Regina Gleason, Carl Ballantine.
Talk about some of the other stuff that was left out of the final film.
One thing about Revenge of the Cheerleaders: We didn't have a distributor. I forget what the story was with Cinemation; they were going bankrupt. That's one reason this film is so unique. We knew we had to have nudity and sex, but other than that we just did what we wanted to do.
In the alternate version, in the last scene, there was this whole ecology thing going on at that time--'73, '74. So that party was really about recycling garbage. And there was a romantic scene between Tishi and Hall Walker where he talks about his war experiences. That was taken out. This is in the PG-13 version.
We do have these other sequences. Still, the "R" version is the best version. There is a swimming-pool scene with a swimming coach and the girls are all lined up on these podiums. It's kind of corny but we used that in the PG version too. Rainbeaux [Cheryl Smith] -- you see her pregnant belly -- she's wearing a bikini.
What have you been working on recently?
I did a documentary on Jack Kerouac, What Happened to Kerouac? Nick Dorsky wound up being the editor. I'm in the diamond business and fool around with video. I wrote a science-fiction script, but it's too expensive to produce.
You keep an "I CHEER" license plate on your shelf.
Yeah, from many years ago. It almost is a little too much to have that because everyone will drive up next to you and say, "I cheer too!"
