Jonathan Haze 1929- By Barry Brown

"Just outside of Googie's, near Schwab's, every night stood a little fellow who looked very lonely. He looked at everybody that passed as though he hoped they would strike up a conversation, but nobody ever did and he looked so lonely. One night I walked up to him and said 'Are you an actor?' And he said 'Oh yes, sir!' ….And I said to him 'Hey listen, kid, would you like to make ten bucks as an extra in a movie?' He said 'Sure!' ….And his name was Jonathan Haze."

-- Bruno VeSota in a June 14, 1975 interview.

The Little Shop of Horrors was the apex of Roger Corman's directorial career. Though A Bucket of Blood, its immediate predecessor, and Creature from the Haunted Sea, made a year or so later, may be considered equally successful, Little Shop has come to symbolize the best of Corman's work -- where a frantic, individualized ensemble situation, a lenient director's hand and a reactionary budget that allowed little room for plodding genius, combined to produce what is, alternatively, one of the funniest and most touching horror films of all.

The star of this modest triumph was that same little fellow whom Bruno VeSota had hired years earlier and, in a sense, Jackie Haze, more than any other performer in Corman films, came to personify all the charm of that producer's early product with its fresh and eager energies and expeditious creativity.

Haze was born Jack Schachter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on April 1, 1929, the elder of two boys. His father, Harry, was a jeweler and watchmaker whose brother was manager of Borrah Ninnevitch's Harmonica Rascals and his mother, the former Betty Richman, had been a dancer and chorus girl.*

* Jonathan's younger brother, Gene Schachter, a beautician turned songwriter, at one time had a band with singer Bobby Vinton, for whom he penned several songs. Now a resident of New York, he is presently associated with rock promoter Don Kershner.

Throughout his early years in Pittsburgh, Jackie was in frequent touch with show business. His cousin, Buddy Rich, sometime actor and renowned jazz musician twelve years Jonathan's senior, played Pittsburgh intermittently with Tommy Dorsey's band or the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours and Jackie was always on hand. The two became close friends.

In 1947, upon graduation from Peabody High, Jackie spent one semester at the University of Pittsburgh, nominally studying English and Psychology, but actually falling in love with the acting profession via appearances in college plays. When the semester was over, he landed an acting job in summer stock in Norwich, Connecticut. When that was over he journeyed to New York.

For a year, living first in a hotel, later rooming with Buddy Rich, Jonathan worked as a production assistant at a commercials company, Archer Productions, run by another cousin. Meanwhile, he scouted unsuccessfully for acting jobs.

He quit Archer when Continental entertainer Josephine Baker, on her American tour, was impressed enough with Buddy Rich's group, then playing at the Strand Theatre, to hire Rich as her musical director. Jonathan was given the position of stage manager, responsible for lighting, props and cues. Touring with the show for two seasons, Haze made his first visit to California. After the second tour closed, he was back in New York and again turned his attention to acting.

It wasn't long before he landed an acting job in the road company of On the Town, but when that engagement ended, he had trouble finding the next job and so he returned to Pittsburgh where he spent a season as stage manager for the Pittsburgh Civil Light Opera. It was during this time that he adopted the name Jack Hayes. One of his closest friends of this period was a singer named Richard Hayes and the two looked so much alike that their friends referred to them as brothers. Finally, 'Schachter' had no theatrical flavor to it and Jack was more and more given to dreaming of an acting career, his retirement from New York serving only to increase his restlessness. In 1952, when a member of the opera company informed the group of his intention to drive to San Francisco, Jackie Hayes went along and from there hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where yet another cousin, agent Red Hershon, had indicated a willingness to help launch him as a film actor.

The Hershon connection proved fruitless, however, and before long aspiring actor Hayes found himself pumping gas for a Tide Oil station at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vista Street, not the most romantic section of Hollywood. In the meantime, he cast about at various studios for production work, but when told he'd have to begin in the mailroom, he demurred.

Spending much of his free time at the popular actors' hangouts, Googie's and Schwab's, Hayes met many young thespians newly arrived from the East and renewed acquaintance with one Dick Miller, an actor he'd known in New York, who made the move to Los Angeles shortly after Jonathan. Recalling the Schwab's of those days, Haze said: "If you were an actor, man, you could come in there and drink one cup of coffee and stay there for twelve hours and read all the magazines and hang out and nobody cared. I guess it attracted tourists. Everybody looked strange."

One of Jack's new friends, Bruno VeSota, a pudgy Chicago actor-director who resembled Orson Welles became involved with a silent feature-length horror film called Dementia and enlisted Hayes as an extra. Jackie made his screen debut as a headless character in a dream sequence (see chapter on Bruno VeSota). He was not the only extra in the film who was destined for a bright screen career: both Aaron Spelling, later the noted producer of such television series as The Mod Squad and The Rookies and comedian Shelley Berman did bits.

Meanwhile, back at the service station, Jackie Hayes, struggling actor, struggled on. One of the customers who frequented the station was a fellow named Wyott Ordung, an actor-director who spoke enthusiastically of eventually doing a film and giving Hayes a part. Jackie never took him seriously until one day Ordung drove in and said he had a deal set -- he was to direct a picture called Monster from the Ocean Floor, the maiden effort of a fledgling producer named Roger Corman. Ordung arranged for Hayes and Corman to meet and the two hit it off so well that not only was Jack hired as assistant director (under his real name Schachter) but he was set to play the minor supporting role of a Mexican deep sea diver and ordered to grow a mustache.

Jackie was on his way and he must have sensed it. When his boss at the gas station threatened to fire him if he didn't shave the mustache, he wisely opted for dismissal though beyond this film job he had no offers.

Monster from the Ocean Floor , released by Lippert in 1953, concerned the terrorizing of a Mexican fishing village by a sea serpent that finally appears during the last five minutes of the picture. It was shot in a week in local southern California locations, Catalina and Paradise Cove. Director Ordung doubled as an actor and managed to complete the film despite a serious seagull phobia that caused him to vomit or come close to it whenever he spotted the bird. The cinematographer was veteran Floyd Crosby, who was to have a long association with Corman, shooting such pictures as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Haunted Palace. Though Hayes had but one scene in the film, the relationship begun with Corman proved to be a major coup for his career. Rarely in the next seven years would he want for acting work.

It wasn't long before Corman had his next picture in the works, The Fast and the Furious, starring John Ireland as an innocent man on the run from a framed murder charge and featuring a great many racing sequences. The film was directed by Edward Sampson, who'd been the editor on Monster from the Ocean Floor, and also marked the first time Bruno VeSota worked in a Corman film. Jackie had returned Bru's favor of a year before by introducing him to Roger, who used him in well over a dozen films in the next decade.

Jonathan played a small part in The Fast and the Furious as well as doubling for star John Ireland in many of the racing sequences. Since boyhood, when his family had given up their automobile to aid in the war effort, he had been fascinated with cars. It was a major event in his life when, with the war's end, his father purchased a Nash. Later, when he lived with his cousin Buddy, Jack got into racing Rich's MG-TC and Jag XK-150. In his early years in Los Angeles, Hayes participated in loosely-organized weekend sports-car racing competitions as well as freely enjoying the more winding Hollywood roadways. "There was no traffic out here," he recalled with glee. "I mean, Laurel Canyon was great to do the street up and down. Ah, man! And Mulholland: dynamite!".

In order to do his next screen role, Jack had to join the Screen Actors Guild. But when he applied he was told there was already a member with that name and Guild rules forbade two actors using the same moniker. Thus, in 1954, Jack Hayes nee Schachter became Jonathan Haze.

The film, Five Guns West, was Corman's first Western and was the result of Jack's introducing him to writer-actor Bob Campbell, brother of actor William Campbell. Bob then wrote a script with strong supporting roles for himself and Jackie as brothers. The movie, Corman's first ten-day picture (the result of new union rules forbidding six-day workweeks), toplined John Lund, Dorothy Malone and Paul Birch, the latter so effective a few years later as the alien in Corman's Not of This Earth.

The same year saw Jonathan test for and win a small role in Elia Kazan's masterful film East of Eden. Haze worked four weeks on the picture, playing the son of Italian farm-laborer Piscora (Mario Siletti). He is drafter for World War One while Adam Trask's (Raymond Massey) sons, played by James Dean and Richard Davalos, are passed over. Jonathan's part was extensively cut, however, and in the final print he is visible only briefly in the scene where Dean romps through the beanfields while the Piscras look on. This was followed by a small, but more interesting, role as a hoodlum in Columbia's Cell 2455, Death Row, a movie about the life of sex-offender Caryl Chessman.

By 1955, the heyday of Haze's work for Corman (and, indeed, as an actor in general) was well underway. In that year, he introduced Dick Miller to Corman and in Apache Woman, Miller and Haze appeared together for the first time. In retrospect, the knowledge of the parts they played in this film gives one cause to smile. In their first film together, both Miller and Haze are plainly visible both as cowboys and as Indians. And Jonathan, first as hot-blooded whiteman Tom Chandler, intend on inciting a war against the Apaches, then later as the Apache member of a group of thieves run by a half-breed and a white man, manages to be murdered twice in the course of the film.

Haze's official debut in a horror-science fiction picture came in 1956 with Corman's The Day the World Ended, starring Richard Denning, Adele Jergens and Lori Nelson. As one of the survivors of an atomic war, Haze becomes infected with radioactivity and is transformed into a man-eating mutant, the type of which are roaming the rural area where the survivors are trapped. The movie, with its effective claustrophobic atmosphere, marked the first time master monster-maker and actor Paul Blaisdell worked for Corman.

Following The Day the World Ended, Jonathan did roles in several Corman Westerns and worked both as actor and stunt co-ordinator in a Louisiana-locationed film, Swamp Woman, produced by the Woolner Brothers, later famous for their Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman. He had begun functioning as sometime fight choreographer a few pictures before. "Roger was good at letting people do anything they said they could do. And I told him I could stage some good fight scenes." A few months later, Haze's work on Swamp Woman having impressed a Mobile, Alabama theatre owner named M.A. Ripps, who had a partner named Edward (Eddie the Idiot) Fessler and wanted to do his own picture, Jonathan was hired to play villain Tim Carey's deaf-dumb sidekick in another Deep South movie, Bayou.

His next science-fiction film, It Conquered the World, more than has been realized by retrospective scholarship, witnessed a crucial turning-point in Roger Corman's perception of his own work. Through the chance pairing and inspired performances of Miller and Haze as two soldiers guarding a research laboratory, It Conquered the World introduced an element of humor that was to be retained for and elaborated in most of Corman's later pictures, finding its ultimate expression in his Black Comedy period of 1959-61, wherein a combination of riotously comic form overlay an ultimately tragic conclusion.

Haze recalls the innocent beginning of this remarkable collaboration: "We (Miller and I) were hired to play two soldiers and it was really boring. So we just started doing bits to make it fun for us ….Dick and I just started fooling around, doing these numbers, and Roger liked it." Roger did indeed like it. Not only did it offer relief from that absurdly ponderous sincerity which by this time had become the standard mantle of the science-fiction film, but it added to audience identification. It would be another three years before Corman developed the idea's full potential, but Miller and Haze had given it birth. The pair's symbiotic film relationship expanded from this point on, ending ignobly in 1963. Not till a decade later did its importance to the two actors and, more particularly, to Corman (who must be given credit for allowing such imaginative mania to disrupt the pedestrian tone of his films) begin to emerge.

In 1957, Jonathan was in six releases, five of them Corman pictures. Notably, he was teamed again with Miller in Naked Paradise, titled for television Thunder over Hawaii, a melodrama about a group of crooks who cruise about Hawaii robbing local plantations. Leslie Bradley played the leader of the group and Dick and Jonathan were his sidekicks, given to ad-lib comic banter. Actor-screenwriter Charles B. 'Chuck' Griffith, another of the old Schwab's clique who'd found a niche with Corman, had written the roles in Naked Paradise specifically for Dick and Jonathan. The same year the two were seen in Rock All Night, a gangster melodrama spliced up with rock 'n roll numbers, and Not of this Earth, a horror film. In these two, however, they were not partners. In fact, in the former, Haze was one of a group of bad guys that menace hero Miller.

In Not of this Earth, a collaboration of Griffith and Mark Hanna, Jonathan had the relatively important part of the unsuspecting chauffeur to a Mr. Johnson (Paul Birch), a mysterious fellow who perennially wears sunglasses. Actually, the shades disguise the fact that Johnson's eyes are blank orbs, a characteristic of the alien stock he comes from on the planet Davanna. When Jeremy the chauffeur discovers the truth about his employer, Johnson murders him.

The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, the last Corman release of 1957 in which Jonathan appeared, was for obvious reasons given a title change. In Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, which took place in ninth century Norway (aka Malibu, California and Bronson Canyon, Hollywood), Haze played Ottar, a young Viking who, because of his size, is left behind to guard the women when the larger men go off on a hunting expedition. When the men fail to return, Ottar accompanies the girls on their search for their husbands, during which trek they encounter the sea monster of the title.

In his acting days, Jonathan was drawn to character playing. He attempted to physically differentiate each character he played. If Hitler had lived to see Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, he would have died to see his fears of mongrelization come symbolically to life, with a Jew playing an Aryan. Required to wear little more than a loincloth through most of the picture, Jonathan had his chest, leg and head hair dyed blonde for the duration of the ten-day picture. Shortly after its completion, he served as best man at Chuck Griffith's wedding in Las Vegas, then dyed it back to black immediately. "I was afraid to walk around the streets at night" he recalled with a grin. "(Then) the first time I jumped in a swimming pool, the chlorine and the sun bleached my hair blonde immediately and I had to have it dyed black again, stay out of the sun and wear a hat most of the time."

In 1958, Jonathan appeared in several films, including one of his own personal favorites, Stakeout on Dope Street, about three youths who find a canister of heroin abandoned by drug dealers. Corman put some money into the picture, but it was primarily the project of four men, Haskell Wexler, Irv Kershner, Irwin Schwartz and Andrew Fenady, with Kershner directing. Originally, Haze and Dick Miller were sought for two of the top roles after the producers saw a screening of Naked Paradise, but Miller rejected the part and was replaced by Morris Miller (no relation), who later acted under the name Steven Marlo. The third youth was portrayed by cinematographer Wexler's brother, Yale.

Besides Stakeout , Jonathan played a supporting role in Corman's Teenage Caveman, with tv's Man From U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughn in the title role of a picture he'd rather forget. The movie was shot almost entirely in Bronson Canyon, one of the most frequently-used locations in Hollywood, seen in countless Westerns, war and horror films. Then, when Chuck Griffith got a contract to produce and direct several pictures for release by Columbia, he gave Haze featured parts in both, Ghost of the China Sea and Forbidden Island, non-horror pictures shot back to back in Hawaii over a six-week period. Besides the movie work, Jonathan kept busy with television appearances including episodes of series such as I Led Three Lives, Highway Patrol, 77 Sunset Strip and Cimarron City.

And then came Seymour.

If Jonathan Haze never gives another film performance, he will still have left a legacy few actors can hope to achieve, for he created (all the more remarkably in view of the conditions) one of the most memorable characters in the American cinema. Even to non-horror film addicts, The Little Shop of Horrors is a gem of an experience and poor Seymour Krelboined, the guileless, lovable screw-up, the pitifully hilarious unwilling murderer, is one of the screen's most delightful persons.

Haze got the role by default when Dick Miller, who'd just finished A Bucket of Blood, balked at the idea of doing a character so similar to Walter Paisley, the busboy who becomes an overnight success as a sculptor when he covers corpses with clay and passes them off as his own work. Miller recommended Jonathan for the role in Little Shop and himself opted for a smaller part, in which he proved quite effective.

Actually, Jonathan had been preparing for Seymour for years with at least three previous treatments of a troubled young man awkwardly eager to be effective against an undefined challenge. Strains of the character appeared as early as Apache Woman when Haze, as hot-blooded Tom Chandler, foolishly determined to assure himself of his righteousness by inciting his fellow townsfolk to start a lopsided battle with the reservation Apaches, whom he suspects of having committed several recent murders. He rides off in the night to round up men from a neighboring town despite his wife's pleas -- a short time later his horse comes back riderless. Even closer to Seymour was the dimwitted bartender in love with his boss (Allison Hayes) that Haze played in Gunslinger (1956). Here, Seymour Krelboined can clearly be seen in gestation. Though the bartender is considerably less ingenuous, his adulation of Allison Hayes, eagerness to please and obvious internal turmoil make a strong portrait that, while overblown for the confines of a standard Western, was to work wonderfully well, with some refinement, four years later.
Seymour Krelboined lives with his hypochondriac mother*

* Wonderfully enacted by Myrtle Vale of radios' Myrt and Marge and grandmother of scriptwriter Chuck Griffith, who not only wrote the script to Little Shop, but did the voice of the plant and played the role of a robber who winds up a victim of its appetite whom he serves hand and foot. He works in a tiny flower shop where he is constantly upbraided by his boss, Mushnik (Mel Welles). Though Seymour has the love and sympathy of the girl (Jackie Joseph) who works with him, he is plagued by a nervous sensibility and miserable lack of self-esteem. His dream is to someday breed a unique type of plant and most of his free time is dedicated towards this goal. One day he succeeds. He develops a plant of a most unusual variety. Through a series of untoward incidents he discovers that (a) the plant can talk and (b) it feeds on human blood. In the meantime, the plant has attracted considerable attention (though no one knows the secret of its eating habits) and Seymour becomes a celebrity, highly valued by his boss and pursued by the females. But he begins to lose the love of his girl as his obsession to maintain his tenuous position increases. The plant has grown by leaps and bounds as Seymour has taken to killing vagrants to get sustenance for its appetite. Eventually, Seymour himself is eaten by the plant and the voice of the plant becomes him.

Intellectual implications abound in the film and as pure entertainment it more than holds its own. Little Shop was on its way to becoming the cult favorite it is today only a few years after its release. In 1961, it was invited to the Cannes Film Festival for a non-competitive screening and it has far surpassed Corman's three other black comedies* in popularity.

* A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Last Woman on Earth (1960) and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961).

Jonathan had but two days' notice before he took over the role. One day's rehearsal was followed by two days in which all interior shots, comprising a good ninety per cent of the movie, were completed. With two cameras operating simultaneously, scene after scene was ground out in a pair of twelve hour workdays. ("Try to be funny for that many hours a day…" commented Haze in a 1976 interview.) When interiors were completed, Jonathan, Chuck Griffith, Mel Welles and a small non-union crew headed by cameraman Vilos Lapieneks, shot three additional fourteen-hour days of chase sequences and Skid Row scenes. Much of the film was improvised: "You had to improvise because a lot of things didn't play funny so you'd have to play with them to get something going," Haze said. "A lot of times they worked and a lot of times they didn't." At the time they were doing the film, of course, no one suspected its eventual reputation.

Sadly, instead of The Little Shop of Horrors invigorating Haze's relationship with Corman, it proved to be the beginning of the end. Shortly after its completion, Jonathan had the idea of writing a vehicle for Dick Miller and himself to follow on the heels of their dual success. To be titled The Monsters of Nicolson Mesa (the 'Nicholson' being a reference to then president of American International, James Nicholson), it would be a story written around two characters resembling the comic soldiers he and Dick had created in It Conquered the World. Corman approved the idea.

"Dick and I tried to write it together and it never worked out" Jonathan later said, obviously disappointed. Miller wanted to proceed slowly; Haze wanted to write the thing through to its finish before giving attention to details. Finally, Jonathan told Dick he wanted to write it himself. Miller was miffed and consequently refused association with the project, causing Corman to back off. Haze himself was miffed when he heard that Corman than talked AIP out of backing it, probably thinking that Haze without Miller meant no-show. Eventually, Mel Welles, Jackie's co-star in Little Shop, purchased the script for Ararat Productions and Haze forgot about the whole sticky affair until years later he saw it on television and was appalled. Welles had fallen out with the company and the script had been turned over to Jackie's old acquaintance Bruno VeSota who, with actor Mark Ferris, did extensive re-writes, cast two burlesque comics in the leads and produced it under the title Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962). Haze, to his dismay, receives screenwriting credit. "Dick and I doing that would have been really fantastic," he lamented.

But far more disheartening than the fate of his screenplay was the deterioration of his friendships with Corman and Miller. Corman was beginning to cut ties with his past anyhow. When he launched his new period of color films with big-name stars he began a gradual phase-out of his former stock company. Only Dick Miller, who stuck with the wily producer-director long enough, through humiliating bit parts, to again come into his own, and Beach Dickerson remained. The other dependables went quickly.

Miller and Haze appeared in two more films together. In The Terror, directed not only by Corman, but by Monte Hellman and Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan played Gustaf, another half-wit, servant to a witch (Dorothy Neumann, in a role similar to her part in The Undead). Miller was servant to a warlock-of-sorts (Boris Karloff). Finally, in X-The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) Dick and Jonathan, in a sad comparison to their triumphant early collaborations, were hired for bits as two hecklers at a demonstration of the powers of Ray Milland, playing a scientist who had developed X-ray vision and, after a murder he did not mean to commit, has exiled himself to the life of a carnival attraction. Corman hired his two ex-stars to throw funny, off-the-cuff lines at Don Rickles, the insult comedian, who was playing Milland's manager, thinking it would help the comic to respond spontaneously. But at this early stage of his film career, Rickles was still very nervous in front of a camera and complained that the spontaneity threw him off. The result: a non-climactic scene for Miller and Haze in their final appearance together. It was Jonathan's last movie.

The joy of the early Corman years, which must have been comparable to the excitement of the earliest days of moviemaking, was by now severely strained, particularly as Corman's ambitions rose. "It wasn't the kind of happy trips that were happening earlier on (when) everyone was on an upsurge and thought that they were growing and here we were at the end of those years and it wasn't growing. As a matter of fact, it was shrinking."

This creeping feeling of emptiness and loss of direction had begun to afflict Jonathan as early as 1961, about the same time that the wrent caused by the Monsters of Nicolson Mesa episode began to solidify. It embraced a four year period extending to 1965 which Haze refers to as the "fuzzy years". "Time just all goes together after awhile" he stated. More directly, he meant that these years were perhaps the most painful of his life. It is helpful to recall that he had been with Corman since the very first film that producer had made. He had brought into the Corman stock company at least two of its finer performers, also writers C. B. Griffith and R. W. Campbell. "I kind of felt that Roger thought of me as his lucky symbol that had been with him from the beginning and he kept me around. He'd always find something for me to do and a lot of the pictures that I didn't act in, I was around to do the fights or just help out or I'd always come in and read with people that were reading for parts."

Sometimes an actor's screen image jibes with his personality; sometimes it does not. Though Jonathan did, indeed, attempt to create characters other than himself, a study of his statements and career reveals a sentimentality that, in his most memorable roles, he did not seek to hide. Haze did not so much idolize any one person as he did, naively, idolize the ephemeral warmth of a group of people, sincere and dedicated who, finally, grew older and more selfish, as people do. And when the Corman stock company began to crumble, Jackie Haze nee Hayes nee Schachter was crestfallen.

Too old to play teenagers, too small to play villains, not pretty enough for leading men, and so much exposure in Corman films at a time before Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern had smashed the snob barrier erected against players in independent films - all these factors combined with Haze's own disillusionment and he began, in fact, to hate the business.

He wrote and sold a television script entitled The Golden Egg, produced as an episode of the 77 Sunset Strip series, about two young girls who kidnap their own father and hold him for ransom, but the property was watered down with the two girls being made over into adults. "For the four thousand dollars I made out of that thing, it was more grief than it was worth."

And so Jonathan dropped out. A friend of his was skipper of producer Harold Hecht's yacht and Haze became a sailor, also working charter cruises. This was followed by a job in a place that made auto stereos. Still later, he heard that the local grip union was issuing permits and for two years he worked as a rigging grip on tv and movie sets. A rigging grip does his work before the company makes the film. Jonathan refused shooting-company jobs "because I didn't want to run into anybody I knew."

In 1965, he began to emerge from his self-exile. Through old friend Haskell Wexler, he took on a job as researcher and investigator of the funeral industry, producing background information for The Loved One, the caustic Evelyn Waugh novel that Tony Richardson was to direct and Haskell to photograph. Using his acting talents, Jonathan would make calls to reputable funeral dealers, using various accents, Mexican, black or WASP, to compare responses to his inquiries for burial plots. Further, he made friends with certain morticians to get a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the charnel house.

The following year, picking up steam and confidence, Haze landed a staff job at a commercials production company. This preceded assignments as a production manager and assistant director on several films, including John Derek's Childish Things, filmed in 16 mm., then blown up to 35, and Born Losers, the first 'Billy Jack' film. On the latter, he does not receive credit. After a disagreement with the temperamental Tom Laughlin, Haze left the film a week before the end of shooting. Paul Lewis receives credit.

About that time, Jonathan met a fellow named Cal Bernstein, a still photographer who was getting into commercials production and eventually Jonathan came to work as producer, assistant and director and/or production manager on numerous television commercials.

He did take time off from commercial work in 1968, when he functioned as line producer of Haskell Wexler's acclaimed movie about the strange detachment of a tv news cameraman amidst the events surrounding him. Wexler photographed his actors, at one point in the film, which the Chicago riot at the Democratic convention took place with them. Jonathan describes the shooting as a "terrific experience, a dynamite experience!". A few years later, he co-produced, with Tommy Smethers, a political satire, Another Fine Mess, which proved to be a bit ahead of its time. Written and directed by Bob Einstein, it featured Rich Little as Richard Nixon and Herb Voland as Spiro Agnew. At a time of fascist solidarity, it disappeared quickly.

After his feature experience, Jonathan settled down to freelance commercial work. In the space of five years, from discouraged and unappreciated actor working melodramatically as movie grip, he had realigned himself to the position of secure production executive. Today, he works when he wants to -- a convenience he never before had.

In 1969, Jonathan married Roberta Keith, a dancer whose Broadway appearances include West Side Story and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He had met her four years before through actor turned prop-man friend in Manhattan Beach, California. At the time, Roberta was married to actor Tom Hassen, by whom she had a daughter, Diana. Following her subsequent divorce, Roberta and Jonathan were married and in 1973 their child Rebecca T. Hayes, was born. The baby was named Tom after her six godfathers: Tom Doake, Tom Driscoll, Tom Hassen, Tom Rolla, Tom Smothers and Tommy Tune. Tom Hassen remains friendly with the Hazes and Diana, Roberta, Rebecca and Jonathan live together in a home in Studio City. Still marginally interested in cars and races, Haze owns a Porsche Super-Charley and a Landrover.

In the last few years, Jonathan has acted in two commercials that he himself produced, one for Kool-Aid, the other for Honda. It wasn't his idea. People from the agencies that represented the products were fans of The Little Shop of Horrors and asked him to do them. Naturally Jackie Haze, being a ham, was glad to oblige. Ironically, about the same time, Dick Miller began appearing in a popular commercial for an oil company.

Jonathan is, indeed, no longer the wide-eyed innocent of twenty years ago. Nor is he the bitter, unenthusiastic wretch that other of his contemporaries have become. If he was self-indulgently dismayed for four years when the world according-to-Corman was falling apart, it's gone now. When this interviewer met with him, it wasn't long before the spark uncovered itself and it became increasingly clear that Haze wasn't through with anything yet.

He intends to direct a picture eventually. He owns, with ABC executive Marty Katz, the rights to the life of Painless Parker, a colorful dentist at the turn of the century who met up, to his own great advantage, with P.T. Barnum, the publicists' publicist, who helped him make a fortune. With no directing credits behind him, however, Jonathan doesn't hope to direct until he first proves himself as a producer and, come hell or high water, he intends to.

Of course, if were offered an acting role he would play it "just for fun". In fact, he would love to play a comic character on a tv series, "but nobody's offered me one and I'm not asking for it, so if it happens it'll have to happen by some heavy accident." Then he added: "I would like to act. I think that those were good days, they were fun days and although you can never go back to where you were, I've gotten used to making pretty damn good money and we live well and I wouldn't blow that just to go and try to pursue being an actor -- if something came up I would certainly like to do it. It would be fun. I mean, I could do it as a lark more than anything…".

The eagerness is suppressed better in person than it sounds on paper. Though the sincerity of Seymour Krelboined is still there, the fear and the nervousness isn't. Haze is a restless man who has made peace with himself and no longer fears the opposition, nor his own restlessness. Of all the actors who labored for Roger Corman, none gave him praise more unreservedly than Jonathan Haze, who had the most to complain of.

"When he (Roger) found somebody he could depend on to do something, he just stayed with them…All of the pictures were kind of like family pictures. Everybody in them were friends and people that you'd known and worked with before…At the time, maybe, we felt everybody was a soloist and that there wasn't enough motivation for some of the things we were doing, (but) everybody was very comfortable working with everybody else and there wasn't a hell of a lot of competition within that whole group of people. Everybody liked each other and it was fun."

When the fun wore off and Haze moved on, Corman's product quickly matured and of a sudden became very old. It was as though Peter Pan had flown away from Wendy, leaving her to more practical, less interesting concerns.