 It’s Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, the 1978 sci-fi spoof
that former Bonita Vista High School buddies John DeBello, Muir ’75,
J. Stephen “Steve” Peace, Muir ’76, and Costa
Dillon, unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Their 35-millimeter
clunker, which cost less than $100,000 to make, garnered a bumper
crop of rotten reviews—plus the “worst vegetable movie
of all time” award at New York’s 1980 Worst Film Festival.
Youthful indiscretion, you say? Well, not exactly. “Attack” became
a musical comedy cult classic—spawning a Killer Tomatoes
franchise of three low-budget sequels, product tie-ins and a kiddy
cartoon series on the Fox Children’s Network. Ancillary merchandise
such as To Die For Roasted Garlic Tomato Salsa, Eat Your Veggies
T-Shirts, and Killer Tomato Beach Towels boosted the bottom line.
|
| Steve Peace produced all four
Tomato movies and is shown here as Wilbur Finletter in Return
of the Killer
Tomatoes. He graduated from writing lame political satire to
writing state law and wound up spending 20 years in the California
statehouse—first as an assemblyman and later as a senator.
He currently is a lobbyist for the San Diego Padres. |
“Nobody got rich, but we made money on all four films—and
so did our investors,” says Peace. And so did a number of
UCSD faculty, staff and alumni—not-to-mention dozens of San
Diego movie extras—who exploited the Killer Tomatoes franchise
for fun and profit and advancing their careers.
“
It still keeps going. These Killer Tomato films never die,” marvels
Martin Lopez, Muir ’84, who worked briefly last year on music
and sound mixing for a foreign distribution version of the original
film.
To outfit scientists for Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, DeBello
and his cronies went into empty UCSD offices and “borrowed” lab
coats that were hanging on the racks. The late actor and UCSD instructor
Eric Christmas assumed
the role of Senator Polk. Some of the footage was shot in University
parking lots and administrative offices, which were housed in
trailers at the time.
Next up was Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988),
which featured then-unknown actor George Clooney as young Matt
Stevens delivering
the unforgettable line, “That’s the bravest thing
I’ve
ever seen a vegetable do.” And then two years later, the
Geisel Library exterior got to play the juicy part of a research
lab in Killer Tomatoes Strike Back.
For Killer Tomatoes Eat France, (1991), production designer Robert
Brill, Muir ’87, created huge castle interiors on the princely
budget of $7.43. The award-winning designer has since moved on
to bigger and better budgets on Broadway.
TOMATO SEEDS
DeBello’s entrepreneurial instincts surfaced early
on. At age 12, he acquired a Super 8 camera and a taste for visual
storytelling.
To support his moviemaking habit, he shot grainy home movies and
charged friends and neighbors for the privilege of acting in them.
At UCSD, DeBello majored in American history, Peace opted for political
science, and both of them dabbled in moviemaking. “These
were the days before film school became de rigeur,” DeBello
recalls.
After their high school buddy Dillon graduated from
UC Davis, he joined them as the third partner. They launched Four
Square Productions
to make sports films and plowed some of the profits into the first
Killer Tomatoes movie. To cover the remaining production
and distribution costs, they relied on credit card charges and
two limited partnership
investments totaling about $120,000 from doting family members
and friends.
“Attack of the Killer Tomatoes began
as a title and became a movie,” says DeBello, who directed,
co-wrote and co-produced the film.
 |
| John DeBello played Charles White in Return
of the Killer Tomatoes. He directed all four Tomato movies
and Black Dawn. His video production company, Loma Media, Inc.,
produces motion media projects for corporate clients and broadcast
advertising. |
It was a takeoff on all
those gloriously horrible 1950s Japanese horror movies—and
it had no redeeming social value whatsoever. Jaws had just come
out—so we made fun of that too.”
Peace co-produced, co-wrote and starred as the inept Lieutenant
Wilbur Finletter, while creator and co-writer Dillon dreamed
up the Killer Tomato name. His inspiration was Matango: Attack
of
the Mushroom People, a Japanese monster flick.
By retaining their ownership rights
and hiring a network of regional sub-
distributors, DeBello and Peace were able to place Attack of
the Killer Tomatoes in over a thousand Southern California theaters.
Its inclusion in Michael and Harry Medved’s satirical Golden
Turkey Awards in 1980 launched the second marketing wind and gave
the film a New York presence.
“I think Attack of the Killer Tomatoes took hold
partly because of the great title and the timing,” says Joe
Kane, The Washington Times DVD columnist and publisher of The
Phantom of the Movies VideoScope magazine ideoscopemag.com). “It
arrived at a time when mainstream audiences were more aware of
the notion of cult movies like The Rocky Horror Picture
Show and Eraserhead.”
Johnny Carson riffed on the title on The Tonight Show. Subsequent
sequels gave the franchise a new lease on life during the VHS
boom of the ’80s and ’90s. “By that time cult movies
had mostly moved from midnight theater showings to video,” says
Kane.
 |
| “That’s The Bravest Thing I’ve Ever Seen
A Vegetable Do”: George Clooney as Matt Stevens (second
from the right), is nestled behind a gun-toting Steve Peace,
playing Wilbur Finletter in the 1988 Return of the Killer Tomatoes. |
TOMATOES
ON THE CHEAP
Cutting corners is the name of the B-movie game. “You have
to cheat a lot and find ways to do smoke and mirrors stuff. It
forces you to be inventive and work in multiple roles,” says
Martin Lopez, who doubled as unit manager and supervising sound
editor for the Killer Tomatoes sequels. “You never
do that on a mainstream film.”
Lopez, whose credits as a Hollywood sound designer
include John
Tucker Must Die, Fast Food Nation and Spiderman,
graduated from UCSD with a communications visual art degree and
zero experience
in sound work. Four years later, DeBello hired him as unit manager
for Return of the Killer Tomatoes.
“It was a non-threatening, non-
specialized training ground,” Lopez says of San Diego and
DeBello’s Four Square Productions studio. “San Diego
film production wasn’t as intimidating as L.A., and you could
learn as you earn.”
Return was his introduction to movie sound work and a leg up
on his future career. “I asked John if I could do the
little tomato sounds, and he said yes. I ended up doing the whole
soundtrack,” says Lopez.
KPBS film critic Beth Accomando, Warren ’82, who worked
on film editing and publicity for the Killer
Tomatoes franchise, enlisted her brother as a tomato wrangler
for one of the films. His job description was to throw tomatoes
at
cars and people.
ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) is the re-recording
of dialogue by actors in a sound studio during a movie’s
post-production phase. But when it came to filming the crowd scenes
for Killer
Tomatoes Eat France, ADR was an unaffordable luxury.
Hiring SAG (Screen Actors
Guild) actors and paying for a day of studio time “could
easily run you $15,000,” says Lopez.
Instead, he ran an ad in The San Diego Reader, paid 40 people
$25 for showing up, crowded them into an office space
at Four Square Productions and set up
a cluster of microphones. “I had the movie on a videotape,
played routines, told people to do things and recorded it all,” says
Lopez.
Victoria Petrovich, M.F.A. ’88, who currently heads UCSD’s
design faculty, fondly remembers her costume design work for Killer
Tomatoes Eat France, “only they called it wardrobe in the
credits,” she says. “I was responsible for all the
clothes in the show, I had one assistant, and I was literally washing
the principals’ underwear at midnight for the morning cues.”
To outfit the French Legion army for the film, Petrovich borrowed
identical uniforms from an L.A. supplier. Despite he liberal
use of tomato juice during the pre-production phase, the film’s
creative geniuses assured her they were developing a special
kind of gel so as not to destroy the clothes. “Based
on that promise,” she
says, “I called in every favor owed to me out there in
production land.”
Midway through a shoot at San Diego’s Bazaar Del Mundo,
she realized “there were all these scenes of blood and gore—and
it was all tomato juice.” Assuming the scene was finished,
she and her assistant attempted damage control by dumping the
white-pantaloon, period costumes into cold ater. “Of course
the director came back and wanted to do retakes,” Petrovich
recalls.
THE TOMATO
STILL HAS JUICE
“I can go anywhere in the world and find people who have heard of
this movie,” says DeBello. “You can say the title to
anybody anywhere and they smile.”
Petrovich just happens to be one of them. After
a 15-year hiatus, “I
found myself looking at those old clips and laughing,” she
says. At the time, she was too overwhelmed to even smile. As for
the juice-stained pantaloons: “I imagine a lot of bridges
were burnt that day.”
A lot—but not all. From college kids who embrace the sophomoric
humor, to the kiddy cartoon set, to pop culture vultures, to Clooney
fans, to Internet bloggers, the franchise hasn’t lacked for
an audience. “Killer Tomatoes has its own legs and seems
to reinvent itself every seven years or so,” says Peace.
Despite the schlocky execution, “there are
real ideas hiding behind the jokes,” Lopez contends, particularly
in the original film.“
It’s about the inability of government to contain catastrophe,” says
Peace. And post-Katrina, we have to admit that’s an idea whose
time will never go away.
 |
| Playing Ketchup in the Senate: UCSD instructor
Eric Christmas, seated in the middle, played Senator Polk in
the 1980 Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. He is probably best
known as Mr. Carter in the two Porky's films of the 1980s,
or Roland the Butler in Warren Beatty's Bugsy (1992). |
Sylvia Tiersten is a freelance writer based in San Diego. |
