Barbara Peeters

Please God, don't let me die and have this be my epitaph.

Film director Barbara Peeters is smiling when she tells me that. I know she's kidding. But then again, she's really not. She's referring to Humanoids from the Deep, her 1980 low-budget sci-fi cult classic starring Doug McClure and Vince Morrow that brought in $3 million at the box office. Google her and, like it or not, it is what she's "known for." (Her directing credits include a half-dozen feature films and more than a 100 TV shows.)

Though she is nice enough to humor me, answering questions about Humanoids and the rest of her 46-year Hollywood career, Barbara prefers talking about what's on her plate now, a documentary, in particular, that could have a profound impact on people's lives. I can't fault her priorities.

Burned out on L.A., she and her business partner Josh ZanZera Willow moved their Silver Foxx Films company up from L.A. in 2008, where they've primarily been making commercials for area businesses. I've seen some of them. They know their stuff. The work is quality. Barbara's passion, though, has been the production of a feature-length documentary titled "Inheritance of Rage." The film, about abused women, imprisoned after killing their abusers, focuses on the trauma suffered by their children. "Their dad's dead and their mother's in jail." All too often, says Barbara, "the girls grow up to be victims like their mommies and the boys grow up to be beaters." The film is intended to help "break the cycle of rage."

Barbara is familiar with the subject, having directed the ground-breaking TV episode of the police show Cagney and Lacey on spousal abuse. "In the mid-'80s when I did that show, one out of every four women were abused. Now it's one out of every three women."

Working through the non-profit Voices Set Free, she's been drumming up financing while shooting a quarter of the movie. The film will be used as a tool to increase awareness and could find a place on public TV.

Determined to make movies, and get "as far away from home as possible," Barbara left her home in Iowa with a degree in theatre at age 20. However, she didn't know which way to go until after a post-grad summer in Cripple Creek, Colorado.

I was down at the train station and I flipped a quarter. Heads would have been New York City, tails, California.

Tails. Barbara headed West.

As life stories go, her time in Colorado is worth more than an asterisk. When a $150-a-week acting gig in summer theatre fell through, she hired on to run the Gilded Cage Saloon, with its player piano, a hot poker game and characters like "Big Bill, a miner who'd never ridden in a car in his whole life. He had a mule who was his best friend." Old Bill taught young Barbara how to pan for gold. She done good. Between the gold she collected and her house cut from the poker game, she left town with $12,000 cash, and this was in the early '60s, enough to pay for a top theatre grad school in Pasadena.

Years later in L.A. while working with a film crew on location, she pitched a script to investors at dinner. "They loved it, thought it was a great story. 'Oh no,' I thought. Now I have to write it." Three weeks later, after delivering the script, Barbara had money and the leverage she needed to get a distribution deal with Roger Corman, Hollywood's king of the B-Movie. Excited to be directing her first feature film at age 29, Barbara never read the fine print. So when her 1972 film, Bury Me an Angel, about a shotgun-toting biker gal who goes after her brother's killer, grossed $3 million, she didn't make a dime. And she didn't really care.

Barbara went on to work for Corman's New World Pictures for eight years; it was a good place for people who loved film more than money. "We lived like gypsies, sleeping in the hallways when we couldn't pay rent, sharing a car among five people. I thought I had the best life in the world. I was making movies. What were the other girls I'd graduated high school with doing back in Iowa? They were marrying the boy who had the biggest farm."

Eight years after Angel, Corman couldn't get anyone to direct Humanoids from the Deep. "He offered it to all the boys, but the boys turned it down. It was a terrible script. So he offered it to me."

There was only one glitch. Barbara was fighting terminal stage melanoma, and before signing a contract, she needed a medical clearance from the bonding company that insured the film's completion. To prove she was healthy enough, she put herself through hell, working on another Corman shoot in the rain and cold of the Mendocino coast, in and out of boats and "getting seasick."

Making Humanoids came with its own set of stresses. Corman's shop wasn't union; by then, Barbara was a member of the Directors Guild of America. Though she thought she was safe, filming on location out of town, "the union rep caught me. He said, 'You have to quit.' I told him, 'If I start a movie, I finish a movie, union or non-union.'" Her commitment cost her a $15,000 fine, wiping out her take-home pay.

The film found an audience and continues to have a cult following. The plot summary I found at IMDb is all you need to know: scientific experiments backfire and produce horrific mutations, half-man, half-fish, which terrorize a small fishing village by killing the men and raping the women.

"A lot of people love it," says Barbara, who clearly isn't one of them. "It's drek," she concludes; it's a Hollywood movie. "I want to do something now that will benefit people."

Rosey's column is an interview, so a few details above are Barbara's recollection rather than the paper trail. Here is what the trail says. She came into pictures through the small end of the business: the New Beverly Cinema's history of New World's women credits her as co-writer and actress on the women-in-prison film "Caged Desires" (shot in 1967, released 1970), then costume designer, actress and script supervisor on three Richard Compton features, including the biker drama "Angels Die Hard" (1970). On Compton's advice she wrote and directed "The Dark Side of Tomorrow" in 1970, released later under the title "Just the Two of Us," which Turner Classic Movies' database still lists among her directing credits.

Then came "Bury Me an Angel." The AFI Catalog dates it to 1971, 85 minutes, produced by Meier-Murray Productions and distributed by New World Pictures, written and directed by Peeters, with Dixie Peabody as the avenging biker Dag Bandy and a young Dan Haggerty in the cast; the working title was "The Hunt." The New Beverly account squares the dates with Barbara's: the picture was made independently with her "Angels Die Hard" co-star Rita Murray and Murray's father as producers, and Corman acquired it for New World in 1972, which is the year she remembers and the moment her eight years with the company began. When the UCLA Film and Television Archive screened it in January 2019, the program notes said Peeters "revamps the popular biker genre" by casting a real six-foot biker as a lead who is never sexualized or brutalized on screen, unusual for the cycle.

Inside New World she did everything. TCM's filmography lists her as second-unit director on "Candy Stripe Nurses" (1974), "Eat My Dust!" and "Moving Violation" (both 1976); the New Beverly adds production manager on "Night Call Nurses" and second unit on "The Student Teachers." Her own New World feature as director was "Summer School Teachers" (released 1975, 86 minutes), produced by Julie Corman and starring Candice Rialson, Pat Anderson and Rhonda Leigh Hopkins with Dick Miller; Filmink's history of the nurse-and-teacher cycle calls it the first entry since "The Student Nurses" written and directed by a woman, and a box-office hit that proved "there was still life in the genre." Three Iowa women take summer teaching jobs in California: Barbara, from Iowa, wrote what she knew.

"Starhops" (1978) was made outside Corman's shop, through the Big Movie Company she ran with producer Teri Schwartz. The AFI Catalog records the messy birth: Stephanie Rothman, New World's other woman director, was announced as writer and director in 1977 and then replaced by Peeters over "creative differences"; the budget was cut from $1.2 million to $450,000 and the shoot to twenty days; the film came in rated PG and the producers added profanity to get the R they wanted to sell it as "raunchy." It opened in Los Angeles on March 8, 1978 through First American Films, with Dick Miller again.

The AFI Catalog entry fills in the part Barbara skips over. The film shot as "Beneath the Darkness" beginning October 12, 1979 around Mendocino and Fort Bragg, California, produced by Martin B. Cohen with Hunt Lowry as co-producer for New World Pictures, with James Sbardellati as first assistant and second-unit director. Reported budgets ranged from $1.5 million to about $3 million. It opened in Los Angeles on April 25, 1980, 82 minutes, rated R, starring Doug McClure, Ann Turkel and Vic Morrow.

A separate crew was hired to shoot the soft-core material, and Peeters said she was never consulted about the changes to the final cut.

What followed was a public fight. A May 1980 Los Angeles Times report, summarized in the AFI entry, said Roger Corman hired "a separate crew to shoot the soft-core stuff"; Peeters said she had deliberately avoided anything "mean or degrading" toward women and was never consulted. She asked to have her name taken off the picture and was told she would have to pay for new credits herself. Turkel, who said she had signed on for a straight science-fiction story, filed a Screen Actors Guild grievance to stop the release or remove her name; SAG had no authority over script changes and refused. Daily Variety called the result one of the most "woman-degrading" films of recent years. The New Beverly history adds that most of the blame landed on producer Cohen, that the added violence was shot by the production team without her, and that the Directors Guild fined her more than she had been paid because the shoot was non-union, which matches the $15,000 she describes to Rosey.

Cohen told the trades he expected $12 to $15 million domestic and a sequel; neither happened. Peeters left New World and did not direct another feature. Filmink's verdict, decades later: she "never had the film career she should have had."

The "more than a hundred TV shows" is where the next decade went. Her own professional resume, posted on the Silver Foxx Films site and preserved in the Internet Archive, lists her as a DGA director of prime-time episodic television from 1981 to 1991: "Cagney and Lacey," "Matt Houston," seven episodes of "Falcon Crest," "Remington Steele," two of "Berrenger's," "Misfits of Science," "Shadow Chasers," "Finders of Lost Loves," "Lottery," "The Powers of Matthew Star," three of "Renegades," "Boone," and the ABC pilot "High Performance." The Cagney and Lacey episode she mentions above is the one on spousal abuse.

The same resume dates Silver Foxx Films to 1997, co-owned with Josh ZanZerah Willow, with a stretch as an independent contractor for Gosch Productions in Burbank from 2003 to 2007 making concerts, corporate video and commercials; by the time it was archived in 2012 it carried an address in Phoenix, Oregon, the small town between Ashland and Medford. That lines up with the 2008 move Barbara describes to Rosey. Her credits beyond directing, per the resume, run to assistant director, stunt and action director, casting director, location manager, two seasons as associate director on "Soul Train," and producing the O'Jays' "Ship Ahoy" concert tour.

Hollywood eventually came back around. In January 2019 the UCLA Film and Television Archive paired "Bury Me an Angel" and "Summer School Teachers" in its Liberating Hollywood series, built on Maya Montanez Smukler's history of women directors in 1970s American cinema, and the Archive later posted a filmed conversation with Peeters under the same banner. Fifty years on, the film she is proud of and the one she would rather not discuss are both in the canon. Rosey's column caught her in between, in the Rogue Valley, trying to make the one that mattered to her.