![]() Everything he does is out of the innocent desire to be liked and respected, not because he wants to make lots of money. With each murder, Walter becomes more crazed and violent (and starting with the third one, his actions more premeditated), but he remains sympathetic because of how naïve and guileless Miller plays him. In short order, “Dead Cat” is joined by “Murdered Man” (Walter’s titles aren’t the most creative in the world), an untitled sculpture of a woman being strangled, and the bust of a furniture maker whose head was separated from his body with a buzz saw. “Repetition is death, Frankie,” he says to his landlady’s cat after accidentally stabbing it with a knife and before covering it in clay and bringing it to The Yellow Door to show it to his condescending boss Leonard (Antony Carbone) and encouraging co-worker Carla (Barboura Morris), with whom he’s smitten. In fact, Walter commits Brock’s every utterance to memory and parrots them to himself and others as if they were beat gospel. In Griffith’s conception, Walter is a socially inept wannabe artist who longs to be taken as seriously as Maxwell H. Griffith, who penned many of Corman’s early films. In addition to Corman and Miller, the third force behind the creation of Walter Paisley is screenwriter Charles B. Instead, he played a flower-eating man who acts as the inversion of Little Shop’s monstrous, man-eating flower, and settled into a six-decade run as the consummate character actor with hundreds of film and television credits to his name, including his very own feature documentary, 2014’s That Guy Dick Miller.Īs a tribute to the preeminent That Guy, who died on January 30 at the age of 90, Crooked Marquee takes a look at the films in which Miller played some version of his signature character, starting with the one that birthed him. He could have had a fourth if he hadn’t turned down the role of Seymour in The Little Shop of Horrors, but Miller felt the character was too close to the one he’d played the year before. To start, Miller took supporting roles in the likes of Apache Woman, It Conquered the World, and Not of This Earth (often alongside pal Jonathan Haze), but Corman was quick to promote him to leads in Rock All Night, War of the Satellites, and A Bucket of Blood. But while he thought he’d make a go of it as a screenwriter, he found his true calling as a member of B-movie producer/director Roger Corman’s stock company. Like Walter, Miller had artistic aspirations when he arrived in Hollywood in the mid-’50s. Brock, the resident poet at The Yellow Door, the beatnik café where he scrapes together a meager living. This is how Walter Paisley, the bumbling-busboy-turned-celebrated-sculptor played by the late Dick Miller in 1959’s A Bucket of Blood, is immortalized in verse by Maxwell H. ![]()
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