In an L.A. City Beat cover story, writer Ron Garmon explores the tortured soul and doomed career of Tom Graeff, one of those low-budget auteur figures whose cult is based on a single film. For good or bad, the film is Teenagers from Outer Space, which Graeff wrote and directed in 1959, when he was thirty. The movie stars "David Love"-- A.K.A. Chuck Roberts, known to his mama as Charles Robert Kaltenthaler--as the most sensitive member of a crew of extraterrestrials who land in Hollywood with plans to turn the Earth into a breeding ground for their "flesh-eating gargons", i.e., Godzilla-sized, flesh-eating lobsters. The movie, which came to the attention of a new generation in part through its induction, in 1992, into the ranks of the turkeys roasted on Mystery Science Theater 3000, has earned Graeff the nickname "the gay Ed Wood", a connection that he unwittingly helped along by casting a round, folksy actor named Harvey B. Dunn, who also appeared in Wood's Bride of the Monster, Night of the Ghouls, and The Sinister Urge. (Graeff may also share with Wood the distinction of having been paid big-budget tribute by Tim Burton; the alien weaponry in Burton's Mars Attacks! carries an echo of the flesh-melting ray guns that are used by the bad guys in Teenagers from Outer Space.) Graeff's achievement, such as it is, becomes a bit more impressive when you consider just how little he had in the way of funding. He stole shots all over Hollywood, used a stock musical score, and managed to secure the services of his cast for free, and then some: one of the film's investors was Bryan Pearson, who appeared in the film as the hatchet-faced villain Thor (under the name "Bryan Grant".) Pearson, who apparently had some crackpot notion that he might get paid back, had to take Graeff to court, seeking repayment of his investment and a percentage of the profits, after Graeff sold the film to Warner Bros. (The judge awarded him repayment of his $5000 but cut him out of benefiting from the film's profits; apparently, there actually were some.) Maybe because of the production's obvious penny-pinching and the fact that it has the feel of a misguided labor of, well, love, for many years it was assumed that Todd Graeff and "David Love" were even the same person, and Love's sincerely goofy screen presence and the idea that this handsome doofus might have been calling the shots off-camera probably added to the paroxysms of laughter that Teenagers from Outer Space has long inspired. It wasn't until an article appeared in the zine Scarlet Street in 1993, a year after the movie premiered on MST3K, that it became general knowledge that not only were Love and Graeff (who appears in the movie as the Jimmy Olsen-style eager-beaver young reporter) two different people, but they were an item. The two first hooked up in 1954, when Graeff cast the young actor, then billed as Chuck Roberts, in a 16-minute campus recruiting film he directed for Orange Coast College. (Vincent Price supplied the spoken narration.) That same year, Graeff made his first and only other feature, a little-seen comedy called The Noble Experiment.
Graeff went on to develop his script for what was originally called Killers from Outer Space while serving as Roger Corman's assistant on Not of This Earth. Unfortunately, Teenagers didn't get him any offers, and not long after WB acquired the film, Graeff apparently had some sort of breakdown and tried to re-launch himself as a religious figure. He took out ads in the Los Angeles Times announcing that he had seen the light and claiming that he had lined up a series of dates to deliver Christmas sermons at three churches; this resulted only in his getting thrown out of several prominent centers of worship in Hollywood, and to add insult to injury, the Christian Defense League helped squelch his petition to have his name legally changed to "Jesus Christ II." In 1970, the 41-year-old Graeff committed suicide, after several attempts to restart his film career, including a disastrous public campaign to sell a screenplay he'd written, Orf, for what would have then been a record-setting sum of $500,000. The only real job he managed to wangle in movies after Teenagers was as editor of a 1964 John Carradine picture, Wizard of Mars, quite a comedown for a guy whose first reaction to his movie career stalling was to take a stab at being the messiah. "“I think the failure of Teenagers destroyed him in a lot of ways," Jim Tushinki told Ron Garmon. "He wanted to do things, to be somebody, and I think he suddenly realized filmmaking wasn’t going to do it and he needed to be something much bigger in order to change the world. Nobody knows what happened to Chuck Roberts, but he vanished sometime after Teenagers. Chuck’s leaving probably caused a lot of heartache for Tom and this was on top of the failure of the movie, so, around about Thanksgiving, Tom began hearing voices, seeing things, receiving messages from God. He decided in order to really make a difference, he had to be Jesus Christ.” Tushinksi is at the head of the Tom Graeff Biography Project, where visitors are encouraged to share any information that might have that will be valuable to Tushinski as he works on a proper biography of Graeffe, provisionally titled Smacks of Brilliance. More meditations on Graeffe can be found at this site, while the Internet Archive offers Teenagers itself available for download..