Wicked, Wicked

Wicked, Wicked (1973)

Duo-Vision. No Glasses - All You Need Are Your Eyes.

Simmons, the manager of a seaside hotel in California, has a problem: Guests are turning up dead, and Sgt. Ramsey, the hotel's detective, has no information as to the identity of the murderer. The only thing anybody knows is that the killer wears a strange mask and has a fondness for blonde women. As Ramsey tracks down a list of suspects that includes the hotel handyman, Lisa, the hotel's lounge singer, finds herself in danger.

Date of release
1973-06-13
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Horror, Crime, Drama, Mystery
Director
Richard L. Bare

Casting

Interesting facts

Wicked, Wicked is a 1973 American thriller film written, produced and directed by Richard L. Bare and starring David Bailey, Tiffany Bolling and Randolph Roberts. It was presented in "Duo-Vision", a gimmick more commonly known as split-screen.

Production

The film was the brainchild of writer-director Richard L. Bare, who got the idea for the Duo-Vision gimmick while driving one day, when he noticed the line that divided the road. "As I glanced from one side of the freeway to the other, I noticed how my mind was taking a picture over here, then another over there," Bare later stated. "Why not tell a film story with two simultaneous images?"

The idea stayed in Bare's head for two years before he decided to pursue it. "I had a script I had written called The Squirrel which had been on the market but hadn't sold, so I just cut it up and patched scenes together here and there to make two parallel scripts." The script pages were divided in half, with each half of the page corresponding to what was to appear on screen.

a typewriter with a carriage wide enough to take a legal-size piece of paper sideways, so I could type parallel scripts," Bare said. "Then I had to find a duplicating machine that would do the same thing."

Once completed, Bare brought the script to William T. Orr, his former boss at Warner Bros. Together the pair formed a production company, United National Pictures, and brought the project to MGM. Within 48 hours, they sold it.

The casting of the killer proved to be a difficult challenge. "We needed intensity and passion as well as innocence, a combination of qualities we found to be rare among the many, many young actors we interviewed," Orr revealed. A young Vietnam veteran named Randolph Roberts was sent by his agent to audition for the role of Hank Lassiter (a minor part which ultimately went to Edd Byrnes).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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