Behind the Scenes: Escape to Witch Mountain (Hough, 1975) with Eddie Albert and Ray Milland

I believe that there were a lot of sightings in the 70s that people started believing they saw flying saucers and there were sightings of different things. And I'm sure that had something to do with where this came from at that time in the era. Reading the script for Escape to Witch Mountain, I knew that this was just going to be yet another one of those great adventures that they were putting together. I think Escape resonates in the same way like a movie like E.T. resonates and it's a child's story of trying to find, you know, it's the prodigal sons, you know, going home. The very first film I ever made was called Eyewitness and was about a young boy in jeopardy. And then I moved more into the world of the supernatural and I made a film called The Legend of Hell House. Disney at this time were developing Escape to Witch Mountain and they wanted something a little bit more gritty, a little bit more realistic. And they had seen Legend of Hell House and so they came to me to direct Escape to Witch Mountain. The screen test was with Kim. Even at that age, I looked at her and I said, well, she looks just like my sister. How could they not pick us to do this movie? Once I started working for Disney, there was no place like home, really. Disney is probably the most loyal studio. It's like a family. You'd come onto the set, you know, you wouldn't work for a couple of weeks or a month and you'd come on to do something else and there'd be Emily, the wardrobe lady, and LaRue, the hair lady, and Frank. There's the camera. Oh, hi, everyone. And it was just like a big family. You would walk down the lot and you could see Jodie Foster filming a movie with, you know, camels and oh, hi. So when I came onto the project, the script was already written and I liked the script very much and then I read the book afterwards. In the script, Tony and Tia were very, very young. In the book, they were older teenagers. They were more high school age. I was a little confused because I thought, well, I'm not 15 years old. I'm not right for this. Hey, if they don't know that I'm 15 and it's okay with them, well, I'm going to go ahead and do it. All that really changed was that action situations were enhanced. And this is something that came from me with the visualization team and the special effects team and the illustrator. We really enhanced all action scenes, but characters, characterizations, and sequences in the book were pretty faithful. John Huff, the director, had a lot to do with bringing everyone in as a family, as a group, as a crew. John Huff was really patient with us because at 10 or 11, you can be goofy. He maintained a consistent, constant control over the set and made me as a child actor feel secure, comfortable, taken care of. I remember one take, I would just bust up in laughter and it was just like, it was a simple sentence, but once I blew it, he would look at me and I'd start to quiver and my lips would quiver and I just could not hold it. It was literally like 45 takes and John never lost his patience. When you come to direct children, they know straight away whether you're trying to talk down to them or whether you're treating them at their own level, but I always had a natural empathy with children. I guess because I'm a child myself still in many ways. I'm going to show the tapes to the children. Good. If that doesn't put them on my team, well, then we'll have to resort to cruder methods of persuasion. I think that probably he worked with the older people probably differently. I mean, I don't think he took Ray Moland aside and said, all right, Ray, listen up. This is what I expect right now. Ray Moland, or Mr. Moland as I like to call him, was just a perfect professional for me and my just overall impression was his laugh and his jokes and his sort of grandeur. He didn't engage as much as Donald Pleasance did and Eddie Albert and some of the other people. He kept a little bit more distance with us, which may have been about his character because that's what his character was very much about. He didn't want to get close to these children. I never felt like I could go up and just sit on his lap and lay my head on him because he was a bad guy. But there was definitely a warmth and he was always very kind and very pleasant and very nice to work with. I wonder how I'd handle you kids if you were mine. Eddie Albert was at that point in time for me, one of the really tremendous character actors on the American film scene, and I was really pleased to get a chance to work with him. Eddie Albert was a father figure, very much a father figure to us on the set. I look at Eddie Albert the same way, you know, sitting in the back of the Winnebago with the flower all over her face, being frightened, you know, and thinking, and then having him say, oh, come on, maybe you're hungry, you know, that kind of a personality. It's kind of the way I felt about Eddie Albert. I'd always been a great fan of Donald Pleasence, and I always waited to have the chance to work with him in film. I can only smile when I think of him. I love him in a way that is particularly unique. He was a very strong personality, a very funny man, very dry sense of humor, which I identified with. I'm sorry, Mr. Bolt, but when you've heard my report, I think you'll understand. He spoke in a very soft manner, and he dressed very well, and I've always found the people that to fear most are the people that are very quiet and dress superbly. They're far more menacing than tough-looking guys to me. He was just very, very sweet, even though he comes off as just really mean, you know. He was so nice, really nice. Hey, Tony, why don't you try it with that ear harmonica? I forget how. When I was casting Escape to Witch Mountain, there was a casting department, and we would interview endless young hopefuls. It was probably typecasting at its worst, having that kind of hair, because I was either always viewed as kind of the oddball antagonist, and I look back on it now, and it's like a loaf of bread exploded with too much yeast, you know, out of the side of my head. This particular time, I interviewed Jodie Foster as one of the hopefuls that came in, and she had magic right there and then. She was up for consideration, but she then took another film, and we couldn't consider her past that point. And then I went on to find Kim and I, who for me were the perfect couple. The moment that I first met Kim would have been at the screen test. It just seems like after that moment, Kim and I have just been brother and sister from that point until it's just going to be forever for now. We schooled together all the time. We played together a lot. Ike was kind of a loner. Well, you have a very beautiful niece to radian, and the most attractive nephew. I would try to pay very close attention to how each actor handled themselves. I never studied. I never went to any kind of acting classes at all. I was completely self-taught, and one of the things I took very seriously, because they were both in the script and the book, was the fact that Tony played the harmonica, and this was how he exercised his telekinetic powers. As a young, serious performer, I said, well, I'd better learn how to play. So I went out, bought a harmonica, and bought a book, and I taught myself how to play, only to find out later it was completely irrelevant, and it didn't matter. There's not a day that goes by that my kids and I don't go down the street that somebody doesn't say, oh my gosh, aren't you the girl from Escape to Witch Mountain, or aren't you Kim Richards? There were lots of us that had a crush on Kim, and still do. She's adorable. She's a beautiful young woman. When people find out I was in Escape to Witch Mountain, inevitably, they ask me about Kim Richards, because everybody had a crush on her, nanny and the professor. It never felt like it was work. It always felt, it was just normal. There were days, of course, that, like, oh, I don't want to go today, it's my birthday, you know, I don't want to work today, but, you know, it was my job. Kim was two years younger than me at the time, which is very young, and there's all these grown-ups, these bigger-than-life people, and then there's Kim and I, and Kim, to me, was still one of those. She was still bigger than life. She was famous to me. Tia, what's the matter? My favorite scenes are pajama scenes. There's something about being able to wear your pajamas, you know, when you're not at home. I remember every time I get to do a scene where you get to put on pajamas and fuzzy slippers and walk to the set, there's something about doing a scene like that that's just so much fun. I don't know what it is. I don't know if I'm the only one that gets that feeling, but I just, I love it. I'm like, I'm in my pajamas and I'm at work. I'll talk to him. He'll be a good bear waiting in that cave. When I was working, especially working on Skate Twitch Mountain, that was one of my first real experiences with animals, and I love animals. I love them. Winky the cat was hysterical. Oh, this poor cat. I don't know how many Winkys there were. There was several cats, but one in particular, this worked with. Winky was not happy. I think I still have a few scars to prove it. This cat did not like what we had to do with it. Winky was very easy to work with. As long as you had a little treat. I don't even think I got scratched. Everything that was done with the animals in the Disney films was always done with a representative from the Animal Cruelty Prevention Society there. Nothing was ever done without the person there. One specific scene, and actually, if you watch the film closely, on the DVD, you can see this. Kim and I ride up on a horse. I get off, and she hands the cat to me, and she can't reach down. She has to drop Winky, and this cat, we had to do it so many times, and this cat just was not happy There was a lot of things I did that broke the Disney mold at the time, which was taking the film on location. Two-thirds of the film was shot on location. The orphanage that we shot at, I believe, was placed in Palo Alto, California. We shot a lot of the exterior locations in and around Carmel and Palo Alto. The whole town was in an uproar. You know, here we come rolling through with huge trucks, and Raymoland, and Donald Pleasance, and bears, and Tony and Tia, here we come. That orphanage was this big, scary, old building in the middle of this forest. I mean, literally, the road that we drive in, in the van, in the movie, up to this place is exactly the driveway that takes you into this facility. It was big and rambling, and high ceilings, and it almost felt like catacombs. Working at the orphanage was absolutely, for me, such a fun experience, because really, it was Ike and I the whole time, and we had fun, but being with all those kids. All the kids who were in the orphanage, or who actually did live there, were extras in the movie. As an actor playing an orphan, I also got a better sense of what it must be like to really, you know, be without your parents somewhere, too, because these were kids that were really in that situation. I was out there playing with them, you know, whenever I could, and say the school teacher, because we had three hours of school a day. I'd say, oh please, just let me go play with the kids, you know. They were so, so fun to play with outside in that big area. If I was to watch it, I would honestly say that all the laughter, and the kids running around, and playing is exactly how I felt being there. Ray Milan's mansion was 90% shot on location in Carmel. There's the mansion. I can remember just thinking the first time I saw it, I thought, wow, you know, what a, that's a real, like, castle. We shot everything there with exception of the playroom, where the marionettes did the dance, because we couldn't do the special effect on location that had to be a studio build. I would say I had the most ESP. The subject matter was really fun for me, because I thought, well, this probably really exists. It was a great device, a great story device to use at that particular time, and just ultimately, I think, a brilliant way of allowing children to have power over their lives, allowing children to have power over their Tony, why'd you do that? I could speak to him without moving my mouth. He needed to move his lips most of the time. He could hear me. I could look at him, and give him that look, and, or hold up my fingers, and, you know, do my thing. The effects on this film were probably the one thing I was looking forward to being a part of more than anything else. When I read the script, and I saw flying, and jumping, and things floating through the air, and everybody wanted the new Disney movie, to see the flying saucer fly, and the Winnebago go upside down, and the kids fly too. There's no question that during this period of time in the 70s, Disney and their special effects team had the edge on any other studio, and because there wasn't the tricks of the trade that we've got today, they were very inventive, and totally convincing. Maybe they weren't state-of-the-art, but I think as a filmmaker, I appreciate the craftsmanship, and how they constructed those scenes. Where the spaceship is landing, and you see it disappear behind a row of trees, this is all optical. However, there is a physical spaceship that has been put before the camera, and the rest of it is all optical. My very first experience with any of the effects was jumping to catch the baseball at the beginning of the film. What I did was say, this is what I want to happen. He has to jump a 50 foot in the air, and the illustrator would do the illustration for me, but how that happened, I had no idea. They build you steel shorts that are lined with wool padding, sheepskin padding, and leather on the outside, and there's steel bolts that come out of it, like Frankenstein bolts, only down here, that are threaded, and there are piano wires that go up to a crane, and they slip these bolts on, and they bolt me to this thing, and I've got these wires going up behind me. It was an amazing rig, because, I mean, there was a tree, so the pads were quite high off the ground, but it, in real time, you know, it pulled him up pretty quick. The crane operator literally pulled the artist up into the air, and the wire was so thin, and painted against the sky colors, or tree colors, that it became invisible. I forgot exactly how high it was. I don't want to exaggerate, but it is at least 12 or 14 feet in the air, but that's only half of the trick. The trick is, I've got to jump and catch a softball. They got a guy on a ladder who's going to throw this softball at me, and they roll cameras, and they say, Ike, you ready? I say yes. They say action. I jumped up there. He threw me that ball. I caught it, and I landed, and everyone screamed, and it was like over. I did it. Bam. First time. First take. I come back, and I start a fight with him, and he magically levitates the bat, and then raises the catcher's mitt into a fist, and punches me. After I catch the ball, then the ensuing confrontation between Truck and I, and he thinks I've cheated, and all this stuff starts to happen, and then I start levitating things to fight with this boy. He's going to hit me. This bat comes up. He hits the bat. Now that's done on piano wires, again, with a fishbowl, with somebody on the end of the fishbowl making it do its moves. And poor Dermot, oh my gosh, he felt so bad about this, but in the first take, he got excited, was just over amped, and he hit the bat. And if you watch the DVD very carefully, you will see that this bat, he hits the bat, the bat hits me in the face, knocks me back, and caused a huge black eye for me, and thankfully my eye didn't swell up or swell closed. It just got real black and blue. We had to stop shooting for the day, and that was pretty disastrous. For the next two weeks of shooting, I had to wear a special little thing over my bruise, so I had the agony and the ecstasy of special effects all in one day. The dancing marionette scene was done in the studio, and when you see the actual film, you can see the top of the marionette bar, so the marionettes are dancing on strings, which are visually shown in the film. Then you see the bar, and what is surprising is you can't see anything above the bar with the marionettes. So there were these puppeteers that were on scaffolding, standing and working above our shooting area, with their own controls that literally would pick up and mimic exactly the same. It was a duplicate set of controls, so they could just do everything that they would normally do with the marionette. It was done for real. There was no sort of animational trickery in it. There was marionettes maneuvering the puppets, and you just couldn't see the wires because they were painted in the same color as the set. Yeah, there was one scene where we're in the jail, and we're trying to get up in the bar thing to see through the bars, to see in the jail. Ike and I were standing on this little board, and there were two men on each side, and they're pushing on it as we like, we flew up, you know, it was like a seesaw, but they thought, you know, they think we're levitating. Tony plays the harmonica, and the things within the sheriff's office, such as the clothes tree, hat tree, goes wild. Now that is a unit on a wheelbase that is being driven, but it's being activated off stage. There are times that it's strictly wires, you see the coat fly off of the tree, that's a wire job. There's a broom involved, which is again a fishbowl wire job. However, some of this is on stage, so therefore you can be up above the set manipulating these devices. I don't know how many birds you see up today in the sky, or how many Winnebago's you see up there today, but being that we were like the only Winnebago that I know of that flew in the sky. The flying Winnebago was a miniature Winnebago. It must have been roughly 30 inches long, which maybe is roughly one inch to the foot scale. The flying Winnebago was really achieved by having the Winnebago strung up on wires on an empty stage against either the blue or green screen, whichever we were choosing to use, and it stuff that I shot with the actors inside was all done on the stage again. There were a lot of shots of Kim and Eddie and I in the cab of the Winnebago, where you actually do see the full-size Winnebago. They do some pullbacks and push-ins, etc. We used the full-size Winnebago on an effect stage on the Disney lot, where we were actually there in the Winnebago. We had all the stuff that you have to pretend, because you're just looking at a room with a bunch of people doing their jobs, so we had to pretend we were flying, of course. The flying saucer happened to be a miniature, and the wires on it were no problem. I would say the miniature was maybe two feet in diameter. It cracked me up because, of course, again, at 11 years old, I know that there's movie magic, but I walked in and I saw that set, and it was this cardboard desk and this plywood plastic thing behind us with holes cut out of it, and I went, well, this is just about the cheesiest spaceship I have ever seen. And I've seen a lot of space movies, and so I know this is cheesy. But I didn't understand that it was a window, and that was all going to be just tiny, and you're not going to really see anything. Kim and Denver Pyle and I are standing there, just waving and pretending we're flying off into the distance, and that was it. If you look at the film now, if you look at Escape to Witch Mountain now, some of the trickery that was natural, that we didn't use any computers to achieve, you would think now that it was done by computers, and it was all done by this special effects team up on the gridwork, holding wires, holding fishing rods. What I enjoy about the effects, about the visual effects, and the cinematic elements of Escape to Witch Mountain is that it isn't as slick and clean as the movies that came right after that. It's all about selling the fantasy to kids, and allowing them to believe in something magical, and actually look up there and see magic happen. When Escape to Witch Mountain opened, I think it caught Disney a little bit by surprise. I don't think they expected it to be so successful as it was. And there was a very good opening week, and then it continued, and it continued. I think there must have been some anticipation that it was going to do well, because within the first, within the first three days of shooting, I was offered a contract by the studio for three years. I remember when we went to the opening of Escape to Witch Mountain, and we were in the back of the limousine, and we were pulling in, and I can remember all the kids, the people pounding on that limousine windows. I have a lot of feelings about why the film was so impactful, and why it was successful, and why it worked. To think that you might be from another planet, and if you just found out where and why, maybe you've got special powers too. That's something that I know I wanted as a child. Every single person who comes up to me says, boy, I felt the same. I'm sorry, but it's very, very meaningful to me. It means a great deal to me that people come to me and say thank you. I wasn't personally responsible for this movie. I was simply a part of it. The dilemma of a child trying to figure out who they are in the world allowed people to have a great time with the movie, and also look at their own lives and say, who am I? How am I special, and how can I find that out about myself? I think that's a side of it that was an unanticipated, completely unexpected benefit to this story that has made it last, and last, and I think will continue to be a movie that people remember forever. I didn't really realize the significance or impact it had on a lot of people, because when they do find out I was an actor and I was in that, so many people are like, oh my God, that was my favorite movie as a kid. I know it's had a big impact. It's still follows me. One of the people said to me the other day about whether there was Escape, and then there was another one. Why isn't there another one? I said, ah, who said there won't be?