Paul Stanley: I Am Finally Ready to Embrace ‘KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park’
The Foo Fighters' new flick 'Studio 666' follows in the footsteps of the glittery rockers' TV movie debut, which the guitarist says he at last accepts "like an ugly child."
BY SETH ABRAMOVITCH / Hollywood Reporter
With Studio 666 (out Feb. 22), The Foo Fighters continue in a long, not-always-successful tradition of bands attempting movie stardom. The new horror-comedy is a spiritual successor to 1978’s Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park — one of the most critically maligned yet passionately loved kitsch oddities to emerge from that decade.
The hard rock band’s elaborate costumes, face makeup and pyrotechnic stage shows helped turn them into one of the biggest acts in the world at the time (between 1977 and 1979, they sold $100 million in records and merchandise, roughly $400 million today), and their manager, Bill Aucoin, wanted to take it to the next level. Curiously, Hanna-Barbera, the animation studio behind The Flintstones and The Jetsons, was chosen to produce the TV film for NBC.
Phantom shot at Magic Mountain near L.A. and followed a mad scientist (Anthony Zerbe) whose animatronic Kiss members do battle with the real ones (who happen to have superpowers like fire-breathing and laser eyes).
“I embrace it like an ugly child,” says Kiss co-founder Paul Stanley. “You have to realize that we were like these imbeciles who got to take over the school. We knew nothing about acting, nothing about filmmaking. We were sold the idea of the film in a sentence that was virtually, ‘A Hard Day’s Night meets Star Wars.’ Well, it was far from either.” If anything, it ended up closer to The Star Wars Holiday Special, which debuted a month later on CBS: an embarrassment that grew into a fan favorite over time.
Stanley, 70, spoke at length with The Hollywood Reporter about the making of the 1978 cult classic.
Seeing Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park as a child left a huge impression on me. To me, it was the coolest thing ever. And then I was reading up on it, and I saw you guys disowned it. Do you still feel that way?
I guess you would have to define it as kitsch, although it wasn’t supposed to be that in the beginning. But you had four guys who never read the script, who were clueless about even the fundamentals of acting, basically allowed to do whatever we wanted to. And a take was considered anything where we didn’t flub our lines.
