Biography
K. Gordon Murray turns up in very few movie history books, but it would be difficult to find an American baby boomer who hadn't at least heard his name, or seen one of the television commercials for his films, if not attended one of the movies that Murray released and distributed in the United States. Murray occasionally produced movies, but he was best known and most successful in the role of a distributor. He would buy up the rights to inexpensive foreign-made films -- a curious mix of exploitable adult-subject films, horror movies, and children's movies (many of them made in Mexico and West Germany) -- dub them into English, and then market them around the country, booking them into one or two cities or counties at a time, with heavy advertising (often on every station break of every major kid's show for ten days before a play date), usually for no more than a day or two at a time, and then move on. At one point during the early to mid-'60s, Murray was second only to Disney in his ability to sell children's films to eager audiences, and he was putting a lot more movies into theaters than Disney.
Kenneth Gordon Murray was born in Bloomington, IL, and from an early age was fascinated by circuses and carnivals. From his teens onward he was involved with the talent, and even helped indirectly to secure the participation of the needed number of little people in MGM's
The Wizard of Oz (1939). Murray was heavily involved in various aspects of the carnival business and also ran bingo and slot machines, setting up makeshift games and fly-by-night casinos in tents outside of medium-sized towns and cities, and eventually moved into the exploitation movie business through his licensing of certain movies owned by legendary exploitation maven Kroger Babb. Murray was even able to successfully repackage and sell films that Babb himself had failed with, and he incorporated some of Babb's ballyhoo into the sensibilities of the television age.
Although Murray continued to distribute his adult fare, including titles like
Wasted Lives, into the 1960s, by then he had already moved on to exploiting two new areas of movie programming that would immortalize him. At the end of the 1950s, he purchased the first in a series of mostly Mexican-made horror movies and films for children, redubbing them into English. Working out of Coral Gables, FL, far from the home of the American movie industry, he and a small group of writers and voice actors began redoing these movies for U.S. consumption, and it was here that Murray's special "style" began taking hold. All of the movies that he bought had a "special" look about them, mixing familiar elements with unfamiliar foreign variants. The Mexican horror movies, for instance, had a look modeled after the Universal-style horror films of the late '30s and early '40s, trying for a look of elegance in the costuming (this went double for any vampire movies) and utilizing forbidding, cavernous settings. The children's films took well-known figures and presented them (usually in color) in strange, distinctly non-Hollywood settings. Murray also began buying up several German-made fairy tale films, also in color, during this period, and began preparing them for U.S. release. In devising the dubbed versions, however, Murray's instructions to his writer, sound man, and voice actors was that their work mimic the mouth movements of the actors, rather than present a proper translation (or transliteration) to English. Watching
Santa Claus, the first of the children's films, or horror titles such as
The Brainiac, one is struck by the sometimes bizarre sentence construction and the excess verbiage -- this is English reconstructed to match Spanish syllable content, and it takes on a unique linguistical cadence and content, similar to the strange sentence structure found in Edward D. Wood Jr.' s movies.
The children's films proved to be Murray's key to fortune in the 1960s. Starting with
Santa Claus, he would book the movies into individual territories, to theaters that would show them exclusively as Saturday and Sunday matinees. He then would saturate the area with advertising for weeks ahead of time and all kinds of specialized ballyhoo, such as getting actors made up as a monsters or other characters from the films to appear at the theaters and pose for the local newspapers, promoting the "event." The children's films were also advertised heavily in trailers that emphasized their songs, dancing, and fantasy settings. The inevitable result was that thousands of children and their parents filled the theaters' seats. Murray made a fortune off of movies such as
Santa Claus,
Puss 'n Boots,
Little Red Riding Hood (and its sequels), and
Rumpelstiltskin, and in doing so created his own marketplace, the "kiddie matinee." A few enterprising distributors had previously tried reviving older movies in programs aimed at children and their parents; one of the best of these was the mid-'50s reissue of
Norman Taurog's version of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer during the mid-'50s. In the early '60s, even the more than two-decade-old
Max Fleischer version of
Gulliver's Travels was brought back into theaters; and following in the wake of the
Batman television series, both 1940s Batman serials were put back in theaters in weekend matinee programming. But Murray made it an ongoing business to program his movies, and he was so successful at it that he was even approached by one of the networks about doing a weekly half-hour fantasy series. He never brought that off, but, from 1960 until the second half of the decade, Murray's name was nearly as prominent and well known in some circles as Disney's as a source of children's entertainment. This was a considerable feat, as Disney had one of the top-rated weekly network television shows at the time, costing millions of dollars and generating millions more.
The horror films worked out a little differently for Murray. He was never really able to sell them successfully theatrically, despite heavy efforts at promotion and some primitive if overheated trailers, which made even the worst of them look more interesting than they were, if no less confusing. While some of the monsters were familiar werewolves and vampires, and a familiar face such as Lon Chaney Jr. showed up once in a while, many were unique to their films and the culture that had generated them: mummies who transformed into bats and other creatures, brain-sucking reanimated corpses, and a few odd variations on Hollywood-spawned creatures, such as "Frankensteen" (pronounced that way) and a killer resembling a young
Boris Karloff. Perhaps the best of the movies was
The Curse of the Doll People, in which a reanimated doll wanders around stabbing people. These didn't do much business in theaters, despite overheated efforts akin to the kind of hype that
William Castle was known for, promising such thrills as "Hypnoscope." Fortunately for Murray, he had the television rights sewn up as well, just at a time when local television was eager for horror and science fiction. What's more, they didn't care if the horror movies were in color or black-and-white, as they were still mostly broadcasting in black-and-white. He was able to license packages of these pictures to a fairly impressive array of stations. WABC-TV in New York ran such pictures as
Doctor of Doom and Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, a pair of movies featuring Las Luchadoras, a lady wrestling tag-team, on Saturday afternoons; both movies, thanks to the unique dubbing by Murray's Coral Gables crew, had a logic (or lack thereof) all their own.
By the end of the 1960s, the audience for his children's films had disappeared, as kids -- even the younger pre-teens at whom he aimed his advertising -- became more sophisticated. He had always kept his hand in filmmaking, attempting to generate some short children's movies that utilized characters seen in the Little Red Riding Hood films, perhaps in the hope of coming up with some Disney-type franchise characters. In 1967, Murray produced the exploitation movie Shanty Tramp, a picture about rural immorality that made
Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre look complimentary about their subjects. He later made
Savages From Hell (1968),
The Daredevil (1972), and Thunder County (1974) -- the latter starring
Mickey Rooney, surely the most prestigious acting name ever associated with one of Murray's movies -- before leaving the movie business in the mid-'70s. By then he had entered the real estate business in Florida, where he prospered even more than he had from his movie ventures. Murray died on December 30, 1979, of a heart attack. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide