Special Report: John Gaspard on Held Over (2025)

Then we go behind the scenes at the making of Harold and Maud, the casting choices that could have been the accidental moments that made cinema history, and the marketing

mistakes that nearly doomed the movie. Next, we dive into the movies two plus years at the Westgate, the one year anniversary, the superfan who saw the movie over one hundred and sixty times and formed a lasting friendship with Ruth Gordon, the two year anniversary, where Ruth Gordon returned and Budcourt joined her and also brought out the protesters. The book also looks at what happened to Harold and Maud after it left the Westgate, its success in other cities,

the stage productions as well as the musical version. Finally, the book examines the last years of the Westgate Theater and their ongoing attempts to find a worthy successor to Harold and Maud, which they kept trying to do until the theater finally closed in nineteen seventy seven. The book is packed with over one hundred and sixty color and black and white photos.

in and outside of the Hollywood system. And then about a year later he did a update of it in which he just added the stuff that he'd learned, and at the back of it he said, I've become so frustrated filmmaking. I've decided to become a novelist. And that's what he went on to do until then with life. He became a kind of a thriller novelist and was very happy doing it. So this is me at age fifteen, reading and going, oh, okay, if I get tired of

making movies, I will write novels. And so for the next forty years I held down a corporate job doing videos for Fortune five hundred companies, and then in my spare time I made a bunch of low budget feature films. I started that in high school making I believe what is the first super eight sound feature film that was done with a code AC system. And then I've shot him on sixteen millimeters and various forms of video, and

the last couple were done in digital video. So I've done a lot of screenwriting and a lot of writing. This in my day job, so writing wasn't a big deal. But as I got older, making a little bunch of movies get just a little bit harder. The hours are harder, the gear, although lighter now than it used to be, is still clunky, and you can't do it alone. You do need a talented group, which normally I can assemble, but it's just it's Mike. It's a lot of work.

And I had an idea for a series of novels about a magician because I had a lot of friends who are magicians. I'd booked a lot of magicians in the corporate world, and I also had friends who are magicians, and so I wrote a book about a magician who stumbles into some crimes, and that got popular, so I just kept writing them. There's now ten of those. And then I wrote another mystery series about a community theater that keeps stumbling into murders. Three books in that one.

I wrote a couple of filmmaking books, first with Michael Wise, back in the day when he was still alive and doing things. I mean, Michael Wisi Publications is still out there, and then they did a couple of other filmmaking books on my own. So not afraid to sit down and write not really an issue. And now that I am in rehirement age, that's my hobby because I just sit around and write stuff.

two years here in Minneapolis at the Westgate Theater. I saw it many times when it was at the Westgate Theater. It had a first year anniversary. I went to that and met Ruth Gordon. It had a second year anniversary. I went to that and met Ruth Gordon and Bud Court and had dinner with Bud Court and shot some super eight footage of them and just knew a lot about the movie and realized that it was in that

two year span that it became a cult film. It probably would have been a cult film eventually, but the fact that it played continuously seven nights a week, two shows a night, three shows on Sunday for over two years at one theater got the attention of a lot of other theater owners around the country, and they started booking it and used that fact in their advertising. Hey, Detroit, what does Minneapolis know that we don't know? Hey, New York, same thing. And from that it became a cult film.

But it wouldn't have happened the way it happened if it hadn't sat at the Westgate for that amount of time. And I thought, that's something it hasn't been explored. I have unique visuals from that time that nobody else has. I have the inside track on it. Let's just sit down and see what this could become. And I did

it at the perfect time in indie book writing. In that world, you can now easily get really high end full color, black and white color photographic paper books printed on a print on demand basis, so I don't have to order five hundred books and have them sitting in my garage. I can order ten twenty as I need them, which is a little bit more expensive, but I didn't want I didn't want to die with five hundred books

in the garage. So I thought it's perfect time to do a coffee table book that it looks at that era, that every page has a nice surprising image on it, every page has a nice surprising factor to bid something you didn't know about either the theater, which had, as it turned out, pretty interesting history, or the movie, or what happened to both of them after they split up in nineteen seventy four. So it just seemed it seemed like a perfect time to do this sort of large scale project.

and every page is designed. There's a template insofar as we have a look for the overall thing and what a caption looks like and that kind of hmplate, but every page is different and every page is going to be designed. You guys up for that, and they said, yep, if you give us enough time, we'd love to do that. And they did just a beautiful job. Speaking of time, when did you decide to do this project, and how

long did it take? I decided late summer last year, twenty twenty four, and immediately began to dive into the research because although I knew a lot, I thought I knew a lot about those two years, I knew nothing about the theater from before seventy four. I worked there as an usher in nineteen seventy five and seventy six, so I knew the layout of the building and I

knew what it was now. But I had to dive in and find out what was it when it opened in nineteen thirty five, and why did it open in nineteen thirty five in the middle of the depression put together by someone who was in the insurance business and had been a concert violinist, but to become successful in insurance, and he decided he wanted to build a movie theater in South Minneapolis when there was another one six blocks away. Why did he do that? What were his plans for it,

what was it going to be? What did it become? And it was just fascinating going to architectural libraries. I got very lucky and was connected to the founder's granddaughter, and she had lots of photos and memories that her

mother had written down about the theater. So I was able to reconstruct why the Westgate popped up in nineteen thirty five, why it almost immediately wasn't a hit because the guy who founded it died right away, so there was no visionary behind it after like year two, and it struggled for forty years until it became what one critic called a resting home or a nursing home for comedies that aren't completely understood. And it did become that in the late sixties and early seventies, which is why

Harold and Maud ended up there. There was a reputation for that. Yeah, so I had to do that research. I also had to figure out what had happened to the theater after I left it in seventy six, and what happened to Harold Maud after it left that theater in seventy four, So there was a lot of research. Newspapers. Dot com is fantastic for that sort of thing. I was able to track down the assistant manager from the theater at that time talk to an old usher at

that time. When the second year anniversary came about, there was a neighborhood protest and people had picket signs walking up and down the sidewalk as the two stars entered, the signs saying we want a new movie and we need variety. And I was able to track down and talk to the husband of the woman who organized that, so there were still some people around. And then all the existing articles and interviews from the time and also from now, I was able to cobble through those and

put together a pretty good timeline of what happened. And that took about eleven months, ten months something like that. The book was being laid out the middle of summer, so almost a year of research in writing.

full orchestra. Because he had intended to have lots of live entertainment. There had been in nineteen thirty five a huge clubroom right off the lobby where people could rent and use that for bridge clubs or for parties and then go in and see a movie. They had a full catering kitchen in the basin for that. They had its own candy store that was also attached on the other side. But in seventy five when I was there,

none of that was there. It was a cramped lobby and a weird little room next to the lobby, and the restrooms and the auditorium. So getting those original drawings and going, oh, that's where the clubroom was, that's the beauty parlor that was next door. They must have put up a wall and made it a beauty parlor. And oh, that's where the candy store was. That's now a little library, And they put up a wall and made that its own building. And that's why in fifty five or whatever,

they built a candy display case in the lobby. All this stuff that I had no idea had happened in that theater was fascinating to find, and nowadays it's a little bit easier to find stuff. I was able to track down those drawings and go to the architectural library and find the original blueprints of the guy who made it. It was fun. Of course, at some point you have to stop and write the book. But one of my goals was because James Davidson has this great book hal

Ashburyen making Harold Mard that has all this detail. I wanted to find stuff that wasn't necessarily in that book, or that I, as a pretty diehard Harold and Maud fan, wouldn't necessarily know. So I was able to talk to

John Rubinstein. John Rubinstein as an actor and a director, and it was the original Pippen on Broadway, but he was good friends with the screenwriter of Harold and Maud, Colin Higgins, and the part was written for him, And so I was able to talk to John about that and his feelings about his audition with Gordon, what he thought about the finished product. And he's a huge fan

of what Bud Court did. But I also learned from him that Alice Lanchester was supposed to play Mode, which I hadn't known, And he said, if you read the script and hear her voice in your head, now else the Lanchester. For anybody to listen to this podcast should know who else Anchester is. But she was a bride of Frank Kenstein. She was Katie Nana, the original nanny who quits at the beginning of Mary Poppins. She was

Miss marbles In murdered by death. She had a very long career and if you read the script with her inflections in mind, you can absolutely see Colin Higgins meant for that part to be played by her, and I think she would have been terrific.

Because the movie played so long at the theater, and if you worked in a kind of theater I worked in, there's a lot of downtime when you're in that sort of thing. That sound coming out of the auditorium was the signal to everybody that, oh, we got to get back to work. The audience is about to come out, And so I thought that was just delightful when I was working there. I don't know what the original setup was, but if you were an usher, you had to add black pants and white shirt and a bow tie and

a coat. And I don't know where the girls went, but the boys had to go backstage, and you would change backstage behind the screen, and if you understand the laws of the physics, a light is hitting the screen, it's bouncing off the screen. No one can see you, but you can see the whole movie. Which is really fun to be standing back there and seeing Warren Baties motorcycle riding up Bullhull and drive from Champoo night after night, because that was about the time I.

who championed when it came to the west Gate. He didn't champion Harold and Maud. He said, that's a great movie, but there's a short that played before Harold and Matt every night called Diduva, And he wrote a whole column on that two days before Harold and Matt opened up the west Gate, and the theater staff is pretty sure that's why they almost had to sell out that first night, because Will Jones had said, you've got to go see

the short. It's sent it's very funny. But anytime he would come to the theater, we were put on high alert and we'd have an usher on either side of the theater. There was a one of those things where you had a door on either side. There's no middle aisle there to side aisles, and we had to stand there and watch and make sure that nobody in the theater started smoking. There was no smoking in the theater, but that didn't stop them sometimes because we'd learned from

fast experience. If somebody smoked in the theater, that was all Will Jones would write about in his column. He wouldn't write about the movie, he would just write about the smoking. It was sort of a boring job, except that I got to see certain parts of certain movies again and again and again and again, which was interesting. And I've always felt that although I wasn't working there during Harold Mott, I did see it, let's just say

a lot. I saw it a lot. And although I was in a film program at that time in high schools and I was in a special film program made movies and did things like that every afternoon for three years. It was a seventies film program, which meant it was the film is a form of expression, and we're not going to teach you how to do match cuts or close ups or coverage or anything like that, and don't

you dare try to tell a story. So my film school was watching what hal Ashby did to make Harold and Maud, the decisions he made on how to do a montage, when to bring in music, how to hold for a laugh, even casting, and then reading the script and going, oh, but he did. He cut out a lot of stuff in this movie and made it better. And sometimes when you take things out, they're better, which is a hard thing to do when you're a young filmmaker, if you're going to all the trouble to shoot something.

But it did teach me that, which is if that's not working. It's got to be cut. And he was pretty fearless about that. So that was that movie's an education in itself for a young filmmaker.

in your normal life. When we discover Harold at the top of the cliff and he straps on his banjo and he starts playing and notes he's playing Segway beautifully into Cat Stephens singing, and we've just been through this emotional experience with him. A lot of movies don't give you that. And what Harold and Maud was able to do for those two years and then when it was reissued in the eighties is it was a thing you

brought people to and it was a litmus test. Hey, I want you to see this movie, and if you don't like this movie. I have to think about you again, because it's something people wanted to share, and there's not a lot of those out there. Rocky Horror was different. Rocky Horror came about a year later, and Rocky Horror

was conticipatory. But it's different than Harold and Maud. Harold and Maud with the exception of it's run in New York for a while where they the theater or complained that people were talking during the movie by saying the lines during the movie. That was not something had happened to Hald Maud. With Harold and Maud, you sat, you smiled, you laughed. If you're bringing someone for the first time, you would turn and look at them when you saw

a scene was coming up. You wanted to see the reaction to It was a very shared thing, but it wasn't something you interacted with. You just absorbed it.

see those anywhere. What I was looking for was stuff you didn't necessarily see all the time, and I found a stockhouse that had They claimed that they showed me everything, although I'm not really sure, but they had about two hundred behind the scenes photos that I'd never seen before, and you could see where there'd be a sequence of photos and you can know that if the next one is there, that's the one I'm used to seeing, but

I haven't seen the one before this. And it allowed me to drop in some photos that just as a Harold and Mog fan, excited me. A really good close up of Bud in character shot from far below looking up at him. Stuff with Hal Ashby talking to Vivian Pickles as they walked down to the pool. Stuff with Sherry Summers sitting talking to bud Court, just stuff I hadn't seen before. And that's really what I wanted was I wanted, here are the visuals that are telling the

story in a new way. Now. If I couldn't find visuals or something, I had to abandon it or not bother going there for me the biggest hole, and it would mean nothing to the people outside of the Twin Cities, But across the street from the Westgate Theater almost the entire time the Theater has been there, and it still stands there today as a little hamburger joint called the Convention Grill, but was built in the mid thirties. It's a classic Art Deco hamburger joint with maltzburgers and fries,

and it's just gorgeous. When I was shooting Super Eat movies in my teens, I shot scenes in there. It was just gorgeous. And so I tracked down the Grand and the owner who now runs it, and I said, I would love to do it. Two page spread in this on Convention Grill because it was part of the ritual you go to Harold Maud then either before or

after you'd go over to the Convention Grill. And he said, I'm sorry, John, we just don't have any historical photos, and I thought, Okay, then I guess we're not going to do that. But I was able to track down

Doug Strand. Doug Strand saw the movie one hundred and sixty times while I was here in the Twin Cities and was Ruth Gordon's date when she came for the first year anniversary, because the theater management said, you've seen this movie a lot, and Budcourt's not coming, do you mind just being an escort for Ms Gordon when she's here. And he did that and then they became fast friends and were friends until she died, so I have a nice I was able to check Doug down, which is amazing,

and there's a nice too page spread on him. I was able to track down the guy who owns the rights to De Duva, which was nominated for an Academy I think in sixty eight and is a very funny black and white film. If you guys haven't seen it, just go on YouTube and look for Di Duva. It's an Iigmar Bergmann parody. It's Madeline Kahn's first film appearance. It's very funny. I was able to track down the guy who owns the rights to it and do a two page spread on that. If I'd found more Harold

and Maud photos, there'd be more in there. But I think I pulled the best from that, and I think I pulled the for the real diehard herold and mod fan. There's some surprises in there, which is what I wanted to see, but there's also enough for a newbie to understand what the production is like, and the problems with the marketing and the problems with the advertising and all that. There's enough for the die hard and the newbie.

Everybody else was. I reached out to Tom Skarrett because he plays a very small but funny role in the film, and his agent said, Tom says, thanks, but it's fifty years ago. He doesn't really remember anything that happened there.

But there's a lot of good stuff that I dug out from past interviews, things that I didn't know, things that hal Ashby said after the fact about the way it was marketed, some great stuff from Peter Bart who was at Paramount, who in his book was very honest in his assessment, saying this was when they previewed the movie. He said, this was the best preview I've ever been to in my life when it comes to an audience response, he said. And he also said, we're absolutely the wrong

company to market this movie. And he was right. They were the wrong company. And the biggest surprise, which maybe other Harold Matt fans knew I didn't know this found in an interview with Colin Higgins, was that the Harold Moutt came out around Christmas nineteen seventy one in Minneapolis, had played for two weeks at one of the big theaters downtown and then was pulled. It was supposed to be Paramount had promised all these theaters around the country.

They'd promised in The Godfather for Christmas, and it wasn't done. Paramount's only other movie that they had was Harold Nutt, and they threw it into all these big theaters with a bad marketing campaign, and audiences had no understanding of what it was, and so of course it died. Now, if The Godfather had been done, I'm guessing they would have released Harold and Wutt in a more traditional arty

house kind of way. It would have opened in New York and LA, although it didn't get great reviews in LA, but they wouldn't have thrown into that many theaters at once. And I think having just been reading a book out Robert Wise's version of the It's Star Trek movie and how theater owners had sued the theater companies for not sending them the movies they said they were going to that they'd booked, and so Star Trek went out in a messy shape because it had been promised to the theaters

for that date. And it might have been the way theater owners were burned not getting The Godfather and being stuck with Harold and Maud, because it's not like the theater owners were thrilled they had a movie that nobody was going to and they had planned to have this huge Christmas hit, So you can understand when they were upset about it, and you can understand why Harold Maud died at that point.

It was a delight when it came out again, when they reissued it and they put out brand new prints because the print that was at the West Gate was really beat up, and would you knew the points where it was just going to as they made the real changes, it was going to be ugly, it was going to be cut up. And in fact, the system manager said that they kept asking Paramount for a clean print, and Paramount didn't want to make a clean print, but they said,

here's what we're going to do. We're going to send you every print we have and you go through and pick the best reels and you can use those and send everything back. So that's they cobbled together the best they could do to show up because it was one hundred and fifteen weeks, twice a night. Original I think the original projectors from nineteen thirty five. I think it took a total on the film, but it was always a delight to just settle into those uncomfortable seats. The

lights go down, Deduva starts. The fun of watching Didouva with an audience who doesn't necessarily know what's going on with it is that it takes about three to five minutes them to realize the people are not speaking Swedish, because it sounds like it's Swedish with English subtitals, but they're actually just speaking a pigeon Swedish and you don't need the subtitles. You can hear you understand exactly what

they're saying. If Bergmann, it's funnier. But even if you don't, the field of Bergmann film has permeated enough that you get the jokes, and then you slide into the beginning of Harold mod It's very quiet. The door closes, we follow the feet down the steps. You can hear of a clock tolling somewhere in the background when Harold's feet at the bottom of the stairs, title Harold and Maud

comes up. And if you've seen the Holdovers, same titles, the same pont they really they took that seventies look. And then he walks over and starts against ephen song. It's just it's a warm hug and you couldn't do that at that time with any other movie. There was no VHS. When a movie was gone, it was gone. It might turn up on TV, but it's going to be truncated and there's going to be commercials and it's not going to be the same. Nowadays, you can binge

to say movie over and over. You couldn't do it back then. But this was a case where there was something that was worth watching more than once, and you could go see it more than once.

to entice people in to see the movie. Oh and by the way, it starts with the suicide, and he commits suicide several times throughout it. And it makes fun of the military, and it makes fun of the church, ani makes fun of psychiatry. What do you do? What picture do you put up? What do you say? They were very lucky. Judith christ the critic, loved it and she gave them a really nice blurb that they used everywhere. But other critics didn't like it and said, Variety hated it.

So you don't have that you used to have a nice review. You don't have any stars. Really, you don't have rom com thing you can tie and do. There's nothing to hang onto really except the weirdness. And they weren't used to doing weird movies. They didn't know how to do that, and so they came up with a poster, white poster, pink and blue letters Harold and Maud, and that was it, and the told audience is nothing.

So the stuff that really attracted people, which was the love and the relationship and the soundtrack and all that, audience has had to discover that and they had to tell Paramount, here's how you advertise it. Here's Harold and Maud on a motorcycle and the wheels have daisies. And it's the sort of movie that is going to be successful because someone told someone else to see it. That's what's going to make it successful. And that's what it did.

When it opened in Paris. It didn't have that problem because French audience is like whatever. Sure folk can see that, but it was a very hard sell for the Paramount Marketing department, and the fact that it opened in theaters that it should have opened in pretty much doomed it.

to do it. But I realized early on if I could find a publisher who wanted to do it, they're not going to let me do it the way I did it. They're not going to pay all that money for those photos. They're not going to put it at that size, They're not going to put it in that quality paper, and that's assuming I can even find someone who wanted to do it. It's a very niche book for a very niche audience. I quote Dana Gould when I talk about it, the audience is guys my age who

are me. I don't think there's a huge audience for the book, but the audience that is therefore it is going to love it, and that's important thing.

it's really fun. Circus Bard, thank you so much for your time. This is wonderful talking with you. It's a delight to be on a podcast. I've listened to so much and not geek out too much. I got we got our geeking out done before we started.