Interviews
Interview: Michael Ruggiero (Going To Pieces)
By Dave Dreher

Oct 17, 2006, 21:40

Hopefully you all listened to me and checked out the STARZ presentation of Going To Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film when it aired this past weekend.  If you didn’t it will be showing again on the STARZ channel and you really need to get STARZ if you don’t already have it and check out this great homage to the slasher film.  I got to have a quick talk with Michael Ruggiero who produced the special and is also the man behind FEARFEST ‘06 which is airing through the haunt season on STARZ.  

HoH: I’ve seen Going To Pieces and it just freaking rocks.  This is a documentary that every horror fan needs to see.  What was the catalyst for producing this special?

MR: Being a lifelong horror fan myself, I had been working at IFC and we did a documentary call American Nightmare and I was always proud of having been at IFC when that was done.  I had a bit of a hand in it just a kind of silent advisor and that film kind of covered the 70's .

HoH: I didn’t realize you had a hand in that.

MR: Well, you won’t see my name in the credits but I was at IFC and kind of the resident horror geek and the folks behind the show they were coming to me and asking “hey, what do you think about this and so on.  It was produced by a British company and I thought that it came out great and we got to thinking, why not do a sequel to that but cover the 80's .  The 80's were when I grew up and I am a big fan of the slasher film and that is when I befriended Tom (Savini) back in the 80's working for Creation conventions doing the Fango shows so Tom and I have known each other from like 1980 from me working those things and being a big fan of his work so that is the era when I grew up and those have always been my favorite horror films.  So now here I am working for STARZ, the VP of original production and on this pile of potential project is this documentary about slasher films based on this book by Adam Rockoff, which is a great book so I moved that project to the top of the pile and started really rallying to make it THE project to work on.  For me, it was a dream project and I got to go right to work on it almost as soon as I got to STARZ about a year and a half ago and here I am now about to premiere this thing in Hollywood.

HoH: It was great seeing so many of the old clips that you compiled.  I, like you came of age in the 80's and I had forgotten about some of these films you dug up.  Films like PIECES and MOTHER’S DAY.

MR: Oh man, PIECES was brutal man (laughs)

HoH: How were you able round up the talent you have on board?

MR: Well, we had great producers and they took on the task of talent booking and I used some of my relationships, certainly Tom, he and I get along so well and he trusts my decisions so he jumped on a plane and came on out and he is fantastic in this and I think we were really able to get him to open up and reveal some stuff that he has never really said before or maybe even thought of before.  We had him for a whole day and were just hitting him right and left with questions and really got him to think about and recall things that people haven’t heard before and I like to think that we have tapped into some new information.

HoH: Where did you film the segments at?

MR: We shot at a ranch in the Hollywood hills.  I was told it was the ranch were The Devil’s Rejects was shot.  It has a certain authenticity to it.

HoH: I could tell you guys tried to give it that Camp Crystal Lake look.

MR: It was perfect.  We had a little pond there.  A lot of great visuals there.

HoH: Any plans to release the show on DVD?

MR: It will come out on DVD.  We partnered with Think Films and they’ll be handling the DVD release.  It will probably come out sometime late spring.

HoH: I reported a few weeks back about STARZ and IDT merging into one monster company.  What’s the story behind that?

MR: Yeah, it’s a little bit ironic that STARZ will now be producing Masters of Horror for Showtime.  It’s great though joining forces with them and it will lead to a lot of great programming

HoH: It’s going to be great.  Any chance that STARZ might be the first to give us all a much need all horror programming channel?

MR: It has been tossed around for years and there was even a few times I thought it might actually happen but there really isn’t enough product to make a true linear channel, not VOD or something like that, we really didn’t have quite enough product to make it run.  It would have been a real skimpy thing and if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right.  There are a couple of other out there trying to make it work but it really comes down to having enough product to make it work.

HoH: Well, I would love to see Going To Pieces become a trademark thing for STARZ, something that would you guys could update every year.

MR: Thanks, I appreciate that.  There are so many genres that I would love to do.  I would love to do Zombies, do one on Vampire films, all the sub genres of horror films.

HoH: And to do it with the completeness and obvious love for the genre, well for me viewing Going to Pieces was just like sitting down with a bunch of fellow fans and talking about the great films that have made us the fans we are.

MR: I’m glad to hear you say that because that is the truth of this show.  It was made for horror geeks by horror geeks and to STARZ’S credit, they didn’t ask me to take anything out.

HoH: Yeah, the blood flows freely.

Click here to head on over to the STARZ website where you can check out the schedule of films and see when you can once again view Going to Pieces.  You want to make it a priority to check this out.

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