Posted on 01 Nov 2012 by Bradford Tatum

The new novel is out for Amazon for Kindle and Kindle Apps!

Her husband’s suicide is quiet: a sixty-milli equivalent injection of sodium potassium on the eve of what was supposed to be predictable cocktails with the Shorensteins.

But Claire Goldman’s mind is not only on the neat and rapidly cooling corpse of her husband, or the bias-cut Michael Kors that has begun to cling uncomfortably to her toned frame. She’s worried about her future, her life without her husband Gerald. He has after all rescued her from the dry basin of the Southern California valley and taken her to a gorgeous home in an exclusive enclave of San Francisco. He gave her sense of style, a sense of herself as something more than the pretty but vacuous daughter of Basque immigrants. But then why, mere moments after her husband’s funeral, is their family accountant implying she’s broke? And who the hell is this “Precious” her husband had on speed dial?

In an attempt at self empowerment, Claire decides to confront the secrets of her husband’s past. But nothing can prepare her for the surprise that awaits her. And what begins as a strained business arrangement develops into a redemptive friendship as Claire and “Precious” realize they have far more in common than the love and money of the same man.

Posted on 10 Aug 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Actor/author Bradford Tatum joins Midnight Corey to talk about his work, his novel The Monster’s Muse, and finally Lon Chaney.

Click here to watch or click here to listen.

Posted on 31 May 2012 by Bradford Tatum

You can pick up a digital copy of The Monster's Muse for your Nooks at the Barnes and Noble website here.

Posted on 07 Apr 2012 by Bradford Tatum

from the collection of Miss Ulm:

"This shot was taken during a line up for Billy's entrance, each increasing close up requiring a lens and lighting change for less than a second of film. I remember the crew being extremely uncomfortable that day, none more so that quietly suffering Billy, 98 degrees outside and easily breaking 100 on stage. It would have had to have been sweltering for Mr. Whale to remove his natty tie and vest. That man behind the camera looking like he might break into a dash is Robert Pierce the camera operator. I remember he smelled of grilled onions."

Posted on 05 Apr 2012 by Bradford Tatum

"It was typical of Bela, " Miss Ulm recently told me, "to be fully aware of the camera at all times. Even between takes." As this photo of the actor with his ubiquitous stogie confirms. "I especially like the idea," she continued, "of a vampire lounging on a Sun Arc. I can assure you Bela was in on the joke, and probably suggested the composition up to whatever set photographer was on the set that day. That kind of humor was very much like him."

Posted on 25 Mar 2012 by Bradford Tatum

I recently was asked to do a podcast/ movie review for Horror Palace, an online horror magazine. I had a lot of fun and suggested we review the 1944 thriller THE LODGER with Laird Gregar. It was a film none of the hosts had seen and it was very cool turing them on to it. I was also able to speak pretty extensively about my book THE MONSTER'S MUSE.

You can listen to and comment on the podcast at The Weekly Horror Movie Podcast 022: Probing Eyes.

Posted on 22 Mar 2012 by Bradford Tatum

I recently came across this fragment of 16mm footage while rummaging around in a Burbank junk shop. The clip comes from the never completed 1951 documentary "Legends Of Hollywood Horror" commissioned by Stan Garson at KTLA, the station responsible for the classic Southern California horror anthology "Creature Feature." This footage, an interview with Universal contract writer Stan Rose seems to have been cut very early from the first assembly. A note, still attached to the film can read: DISCARD SEGMENT, ULM MENTIONED". Even as late as 1951, certain entities at Universal were still making efforts to minimize Miss Ulm's contributions to the horror cycle of previous decades.

Posted on 18 Mar 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Here is a photo of the Santa Monica Pier circa 1929. At the far end one can see the LA MONICA BALLROOM where Miss Ulm, with Lon Chaney, first met Tod Browning.

Posted on 18 Mar 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Among Miss Ulm's myriad mementos, none is more telling as to the warm humor of her friend "Billy Pratt" than this publicity still from the late thirties. Forced to pose with any number of thin nourishments during his tenure as the creature, this mocking pose with cup and bit toast conveys the comical tedium of the studios continued efforts to portray Mr Karloff as the classic English gent.
Misidentified as a behind the scenes shot from The Bride, Miss Ulm informed me that this pictures was actually taken in the Dodger's locker room during the 1938 World Series. "Frankenstein" threw the first pitch that year.

Posted on 04 Mar 2012 by Bradford Tatum

After Miss Ulm's "removal" from Universal, she retreated to the hills that surround Beachwood Drive. Many had preceded her: Bogart, Busby Berkley, Baby Peggy. This is the brochure that introduced her to her "human garage".

Posted on 01 Mar 2012 by Bradford Tatum

"Frankenstein came to Los Angeles a hit. That was the way back then. Movies either reached the heights after hundreds of one night headliners, playing converted vaudeville houses that still smelled of gas lamps and grease paint or were buried in the ditches outside of town. Much like indie rock bands today. The road was the proving ground. The public still mattered."
So says Miss Ulm.

Posted on 29 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Photographed before a phallus of European gothic, the Universal production head and his father grin uncharacteristically at the camera.

“They were always at one another’s throats,” Miss Ulm remembers. “Junior seemed to begin every foray of his with the words ‘but, Pop’, as he desperately tried to convince his father of the company’s emerging horror brand. And the old man, that darling old relic, would huff and curse in the fathertongue as he tried to rebuff his angrily enthusiastic son. Junior was never happier than when handing his poison pen to yet another defeated horror lead and Uncle Carl. Well, Uncle Carl seemed happiest pointing his walking stick at the plaster and plywood backlot reproductions of the Old World on his twenty-five cent tours. Looking at Universal today, you can see they both ultimately got their way."

Posted on 23 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Here are a couple of the ads that will be running in horror magazines next month.



Rue Morgue



and Diabolique

Posted on 19 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

"To my dear Maddy, with love, Karl" reads this eight by ten from the collection of Miss Ulm. The "Karl" is Karl Freund, the cinematographer of DRACULA and Maddy's mentor during her UFA days. "If the picture holds any visual interest, it is largely due to him," Miss Ulm told me. "All my efforts were thoroughly exercised in post."

Posted on 18 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

This beautiful copper nitrate print form Maddy Ulm's masterpiece ZIPPER was originally sold to sexual adventurers on Alexanderstrasse during the days of Weimar Berlin. A card like this could have been had for little more than the equivalent of a few pennies, but now are all but unheard of. This one was sent to me as a scan from an anonymous source out of Belgium. Notice the zipper enclosure on the sternum. The green patina is probably not original to the print and is an effect of time and the heavy copper content in the developing solution.

Posted on 17 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Between takes on the set of the Bride.

Posted on 17 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Here is an alternate cover in the style of Italian Futurism...

Posted on 17 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

This photograph of a cupboard door from a men’s room utility closet was found in the files of the Schutzstaffel after the allied liberation of Berlin. Apparently it was originally painted for the men’s lavatory of a Biergarten frequented by the SA until the end of the war. It is painted in the style of the Viennese Secession and the female figure has been confirmed by Miss Ulm to be based on a likeness of her mother, Tanzi Fluke. “ I’m sure it’s her,” Miss Ulm said. “It’s typical to see her lingering in a men’s bathroom, even in effigy-- ‘though I don’t think this painting was done by any known artist.” Why a photograph of a bathroom closet was in the files of the SS speaks less to the painting’s artistic merits than to Miss Fluke’s ability to fascinate those in positions of power. “The cupboard was in clear view of the commodes so its hardly a leap to conceive of her likeness being ‘rhythmically admired’ by any number of Nazi officers and only later met, or commanded to be met, in the flesh.”

Posted on 15 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Posted on 14 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

Here is the Egon Schiele (1890-1918) drawing of Maddy that she recognized as herself from the collection of James Whale, the director of Frankenstein. Another drawing, much like it but with dark eyes and no bangs, is in the Leopold Collection in Vienna. But Maddy assures me both drawings are from the same frantic session. “Once the artist found a pose he preferred,” she says, “one was inclined to hold it indefinitely, at least until one no longer heard the rustle of pages falling to the floor.” The version in the Leopold Museum has been mis-identified, according to Miss Ulm, as Sitzendes krankes Mӓdchen (Sick Girl, Seated). “The only thing I was sick with was anticipation,” she told me. “And I was not seated. I was reclining, having just awoken in a room cold enough to hang meat.” I asked her why she never named the artist outright in her memoir. “We were never properly introduced,” she said. “I knew him much like he knew me. Beyond names, down to the depths of intimate function.”

Posted on 14 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

for my Muse...

Posted on 12 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

From the personal collection of Maddy Ulm, this is the very pass used by her companion Mutter and she during their early tenure at the studio. Showing this pass allowed the bearer access to any corner of the lot. Good for a rub-down at the exclusive Emperor's Club or a full meal at the commissary, such passes are becoming increasingly rare pieces of Hollywood ephemera. Though technically no longer under contract to Universal at the time, the efficacy of this small card is testament to Chaney’s continued stature at a studio many believed he single handedly kept solvent.

Posted on 10 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

It is estimated that fifty percent of all sound films produced between 1930-1950 have been lost. When that same lens of perdition is focused on the silent era, the number climbs to eighty percent. Mavericks rogues and madmen, quickening geniuses still blinking through their nitrate filled amniotic sacks, pushing a new medium to glorious and giddy extremes before the plow of criteria and market share can be attached, all those flashes of brilliance or folly (or, let’s be honest, mediocrity) lost for eternity. “Lost” to me connotes an irreducible state. We either have it or we don’t. But Hollywood is a town of degrees, of contingencies and equivocations that can seem to the sober world to be downright contradictions. Thus only films that don’t exist at all, in any form other that scripts or stills (how else would one know what has been lost?) are considered purely lost. But when a glimpse, an idea, a few hundred feet of flickering potential is found, then the film is only “partially” lost. (In my mind, that’s just footage and footage does not make a film.)

One of the great “partial” losses to the world of horror is the Browing/Chaney film “London After Midnight”, the 1927 thriller about a Scotland yard con man who poses as a vampire and was the duo’s most financially successful collaboration. But a greater loss still, at least for the purposes of this blog, is Maddy Ulm’s masterpiece “Zipper.” It is also a collaboration. But a collaboration that transcends not just the formalities of mind and temperament but of death as well. It may be, if Miss Ulm is to be believed, the first film to be co-authored by a ghost. Part protean body horror, part cautionary feminist parable, “Zipper” is the only film to star Miss Ulm’s mother, the notorious Weimar beauty and nightclub owner, Tanzi Fluke. This film is considered a “possible partial” loss, meaning rumors of its pieces surface now and again. The latest such rumor is a diary entry by a young Bud Schulberg (whose father BP Schulberg was head of production during Paramount’s formative years) who purports to have seen the climax of the film cut into some rather mediocre stag footage when he broke in on his father and Sylvia Sydney in their Malibu love nest in the mid thirties. Tod Browning saw it, owned a copy, in fact. His extreme reaction to the picture indelibly informed the classic horror genre and is well, if chillingly, documented in The Monster’s Muse. But I have to date never been able to procure even a single strip of footage from Ulm’s “Zipper.” E-mails go unanswered, long distance calls are delayed, sent adrift in a fog of distortion and when connected, roundly rebuffed. I have sent entire flotillas of paper correspondence to places as remote as Radjiak where an orthodox cloister was rumored to harbor a copy to dissuade novitiates from the lure of loose women. But to no avail. The best I could find was a single damaged still, used, Miss Ulm informs me, by the engraver who designed the film’s one-sheet. But the search continues....

Posted on 09 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

It may be of interest to note that the girl featured in this photograph is not Maddy Ulm. One of the first things I noticed about Miss Ulm upon our first meeting was her striking resemblance to my own daughter, and, as I seem to be in the habit of doing, it is my daughter who poses again for the cover of her father’s book. Miss Ulm flatly refused to be photographed. Even in her own day, she said, she hated being in front of the camera’s “dissecting lens.” There is, however, more than a passing physical resemblance between to the two as this photograph, the only known photograph of Maddy Ulm, will attest to:


She told me this photograph was a rather reluctant lighting test taken around 1930 on the set of Dracula.

Posted on 08 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

When I suggested to Miss Ulm the possibility of including music of the era on this site, she greeted my suggestion, as she did with most of my initial ideas, with what could be generously called amused reticence. I told her that one of the interesting things the site could provide was a real flavor of the era, that along with insights and photographs we could also provide the public with some of the popular sounds of the day. She went on to tell me in her sweetly implacable way that the common music of the era was “narcotic” in nature, designed to subvert the general population’s innate unease with the economic and social tremors that were keenly felt even as early as the late 1920’s. The “authentic” music of those days, those that reflected the real uncertain spirit of the times were not popular and not played by white men. But if I was insistent on playing something “popular” I would do well to include the song that was “bleating” during her first meeting with Tod Browning at the La Monica Ballroom, the music those “idiots were dragging their woefully depleted limbs” to at the dance marathon. This scene is included in the book and so perhaps will help the reader to more fully envision the setting. Hence Abe Lyman’s “California Blues.”

Posted on 07 Feb 2012 by Bradford Tatum

My new book The Monster’s Muse is now available for download from Amazon, hard copies to follow for those of you interested. This book is a real departure for me, based, if my source can be believed, on absolute fact. Now there are several books about Hollywood’s famous horror cycle of the 1930’s, more on the inner workings of the studio system itself. But what drew me to this subject was that it is based on the purported reminiscences of a single individual, an individual so unnervingly unique, with such a privileged point of view into the real working of several classic horror films that I could not resist committing her tale to paper (or what ever one might call Kindle’s little read-out screen.)

It all began with a single piece of paper. A few years ago, I found myself at Comic Con (my wife was making an appearance there) among one of several Hollywood memorabilia sellers. I have always had an affinity for the ephemera of old Hollywood, especially anything from the classic Universal horror cycle of the 1930’s. There among the pristine lobby cards and super rare one sheets was this:

As soon as I had my hot little fingers on it, it was promptly snatched from me. “Oh Dude. That shouldn’t be there,” said the vendor who bore an uncomfortable resemblance Ashton Kutcher (if Mr Kutcher subsisted on microwave pizza and diet soda.)

“What’s so special about it?”

“The stationery alone is worth some major coinage but the fact that’s it’s actually used...dude.” He let me look at it from the cradle of his finger tips. It seemed just another dry communication between Universal’s distribution arm and a first run movie house. (That little sheet of inter-office flotsam actually did go on to sell for over two grand at the Heritage Auction House in Los Angeles.)

“What’s that scribbled there?”

“That’s what makes it super toasty.” Scribbled in the margins were the words: “John, the kid’s name is Maddy Ulm--she is legit! Best....”

“I don’t get it,” I said. Because I didn’t.

“You’ve never heard of Maddy Ulm? The Ghost of Stage 28? Vampire girl of Universal City?” I had heard of Stage 28, had actually worked on that stage and met my wife there while we were both working on SeaQuest a thousand years ago. It was the stage for Chaney’s 1927 Phantom of the Opera and the opera seats from the original set were still there.

“Nope,” I said, not wanting to get into my personal history.

“Well, a lot of crazy stuff has been attributed to this girl. Some say she was an editor on Chaney’s Phantom and that she really directed Lugosi’s Dracula. I even heard it was a toss up between her and Whale to direct Frankenstein.”

“That has to be total bullshit.”

“I don’t know...” the vendor went on. Now I don’t think its an indecorous breach to suggest that movie memorabilia hawkers are known to work the same side of the street as conspiracy theorists and all-night gamers. So I was incredulous. To say the least. But he went on.

“I talked to the son of the original owner of the Aztec Theater in Pacoima. It’s demolished now but back then it was a first run house and he remembers this crazy little white girl, no more than ten he said, who had been sent by the studio to organize a test screening for All Quiet on the Western Front. Her name was Maddy Ulm.”

“A little girl directed Dracula? Bullshit.”

“I know. But there was a Maddy Ulm under contract to Universal between 1930-1935.”

“What does that prove?”

“Nothing. Unless you believe Forry.” Forry was Forrest Ackerman, the creator of the bible of horror fan geekdom, Famous Monster’s of Filmland and an unrepentant hoarder of memorabilia until his death. Now everything in Memoryland is distilled through a filter, a viscous membrane of either time or pot smoke or both and so I had to take what he told me next with a staggeringly large grain of salt. Apparently, as a much younger man, Forry had presided over a small convention that honored the king himself, Boris Karloff. It was at that little get together that Forry said he saw Mr. Karloff embrace a weeping ten year-old girl, after having exchanged several “friendly” words with her. Forry distinctly remembers Karloff calling her Maddy. And this Maddy, whomever she was, calling the king Billy. Now this was 1963 or something. Ten years old in ’63 and the 1930’s? Weird.

I suppose that should have been the end of it. This vendor was obviously in the throes of some major psychotropic substance and I needed to eat something other than a cheese hot dog. So we left Comic-Con, my wife and I. And I tried to forget it. Maybe I was sentimental about the Stage 28 connection, or there was something in her name. Or I just liked a good mystery like anyone else. Suffice it to say I went a little nuts. I also had an advantage. As an actor I was lucky enough to do several guest spots on the Universal lot where I quickly ingratiated myself to anyone who looked over fifty. Surprisingly, I was able to find a few people who, although they had never met Maddy themselves, knew stories about her. I was even allowed (long story) into the Universal archives one lunch break and saw Maddy’s original contract and pay stubs as well as a few repair bills for a modified Packard pick-up truck she owned and leased to the studio.The girl was real. Even if the stories attributed to her were not.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I was going to tell her story. All that was missing was the words from the girl (woman) herself. Some things are destined. And the way I finally net Maddy Ulm was definitive of those things. One day, last summer, our gardeners brought their grandfather to work. He sat on the tail gait of his son’s truck while his grandsons blew leaves and mowed. It was a hot day and so I brought the old man a cold beer. He took the beer with a gracious bow of his head and when he looked up at me I saw he had incredible blue eyes. None of his offspring seemed to share this trait and when I told him, in very broken Spanish, how beautiful I thought they were, he again thanked me and told me, in English far better than my Spanish, that he was half German. His mother was a full-blood from Mexico but his father had been a German WWI vet who ended up working as a stunt man for Universal in the thirties. He then went on to say that his father, having been badly wounded in Belgium, was actually the model for the Jack Pierce Frankenstein creature make-up. He said he father had come to this country with his best and only friend, another wayward German named Maddy Ulm. I almost fell over. Was he really telling me that his father was best friends with the girl/legend I was desperate to meet? He took several more beers, but by the end of the afternoon, I had an address.

Meeting Maddy far exceeded my wildest imaginings. I don’t know what I expected, some shriveled woman, well into her dotage, steeped in vague bitterness and the smoke from her menthols, a dithering, half-demented old curmudgeon who couldn’t resist, in her whisky raped voice, to dress down the terrible powers that be in tinsel town. Nothing prepared me for what she actually was. Is. Her apartment is exactly as I describe it in the opening pages of the book. Her appearance is as close as my descriptive powers can get. But the person, the entity of the Maddy Ulm I spent several months with, listening to, laughing with, crying with, arguing with, I can only hope I have done justice to her.

“Words are not my medium, mein lieber, “ she said to me once I had decided to tell her story. “Write it as fiction. That’s the only way you’ll get people to believe it.”