How A Fertilizer Salesman Created One Of The Worst Movies of All Time... And How It Found An Audience

Manos: The Hands of Fate has one of the strangest backstories ever for a film. Here is that backstory.

By Jamie LammersPublished 3 years ago • 12 min read

Harold P. Warren had no experience making films. He was a salesman of fertilizer and insurance, and he’d never so much as created an outline for a film script before. He’d written some books and plays, but he’d never attempted to shoot a feature film. His friend, Stirling Silliphant, however, had actual script-writing experience. He has writing or co-writing credits on dozens of films, including The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and In The Heat of the Night. In fact, In The Heat of the Night won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He also worked on various TV programs, including the hit show Route 66, where he met Warren as he was scouting locations for an episode.

Years after this first encounter, they met at a coffee shop in their hometown of El Paso, Texas. They chatted for a while, and at one point during the conversation, Warren claimed that it didn’t seem that hard to make a film. To the face of this Oscar-winning screenwriter, he boasted that he could even make one himself. Silliphant took him up on this offer, making a bet with him to finish this feature film he was so sure he could make. Warren immediately accepted the bet, grabbing the nearest napkins and scribbling an outline for the film on them.

Warren gathered money from friends and family, raising $19,000 in 1960s money for the final project. He titled the completed screenplay The Lodge of Sins and began filming in the summer of 1966, shooting at the private ranch of County Judge Colbert Coldwell. All of the crew members were local, mostly coming from El Paso theater companies and all of whom had day jobs outside of filming. Production of the film, briefly titled Fingers of Fate before actor Tom Neyman suggested the final title of Manos: The Hands of Fate, took place over a grueling two and a half months. The actors and crew, who all became overwhelmed and frustrated during production, jokingly referred to the movie as Mangos: Cans of Fruit behind Warren’s back as shooting went on. This sarcastic nickname indicates the crew knew that the film was going to be an utter disaster.

During the shoot, various technical issues became apparent. The only camera the crew had access to was a Filmo 70 camera. It was a flimsy piece of technology, a spring-wound camera that could only film 32 seconds at a time and couldn’t record live sound. Because of this, various editing problems are visible in the final cut, and every sound effect and line of dialogue had to be dubbed over during post-production. There was also minimal lighting, and because of the crew’s day jobs, many sequences were shot at night. This only allowed actors to take a few steps forward before the darkness of the evening surrounded them. Actor John Reynolds adopted an ungainly appearance resulting from an amateur metallic rigging system and padding under his legs that Tom Neyman designed for him. Some crew members claim that Reynolds was also given cloven-hoofed feet to make him look like a satyr, but others (including Tom) claim that they only intended to make him look strange. If the intention was to make him look like a satyr, his cloven hooves either didn’t make it into the final cut or are almost impossible to make out. So many technical problems came up that the film’s motto became "We’ll Fix It in the Lab,” referring to the hope that everything that went wrong on set would be fixed in the editing room.

Warren’s directorial visions and problems with the cast and crew during filming also caused some setbacks. Models from Mannequin Manor were cast for the film, and they infuriated Warren because, during every take, they walked as if they were on a catwalk. The head of the modeling agency, Fran Simon, ordered Warren to change the outfits from tight white robes in the script to something less risque. A part was written for Joyce Molleur, a local actress, but she broke her leg while performing a stunt for the film. This required Warren to rewrite her part, with the stunt coordinator, Bernie Rosenblum, acting as her beau as they made out in a car on the side of the road. This plot point, which made it into the final cut, ultimately had nothing to do with the film’s story. One day, Warren even threw a slate at Bob Guidry, the director of cinematography, after he jokingly showed up wearing a safari outfit. The self-made director, writer, and producer was clearly an amateur in his execution, but he was determined to finish the film. Clearly, though, finishing a feature film was much harder than he had anticipated.

Somehow, despite the lackluster equipment, scheduling conflicts, and personal disagreements that could have made even the most expensive of film shoots collapse in on themselves, Warren and the crew managed to finish the film, with its title formatted in the opening sequence as “Manos” The Hands of Fate. The film stars Warren and Diane Mahree as Michael and Margaret, a married couple who get lost with their daughter, Debbie (Jackie Neyman) as they attempt to find a hotel. They come across a house that seems to appear out of thin air and meet the caretaker, Torgo (John Reynolds), who has some sinister secrets of his own. He attempts to seduce Margaret into becoming a bride for his leader, The Master (Tom Neyman, the father of the actress who portrayed Debbie), who already has many wives under his servitude (played by the Mannequin Manor models).

Yet another miracle for Manos: The Hands of Fate was that Warren somehow managed to get the film distributed to theaters. Through Emerson Releasing Corporation, the film premiered for the first time at the Capri Theater in downtown El Paso. Warren managed to spread the news to local media outlets and raise excitement for the film. The cast and crew rented tuxedos for everybody involved with production for the premiere. Warren rented a searchlight and paid for a 1955 limo to make multiple trips, picking up two members of the cast and crew at a time to take them to the theater. Unfortunately, John Reynolds, who played Torgo, was unable to attend the premiere. He had a strained relationship with his father and served as an Air Force colonel during his life. As a result of trauma resulting from these experiences, along with experimenting with LSD, he committed suicide six months after the film’s production wrapped.

For those who could attend, however, there were high expectations for the quality of the film. The auditorium was completely packed, the audience waiting with bated breath as advertisements played before the film. Once the film finally started, the excitement was running high. Warren had promoted the film as being based on a Mexican folktale and insisted that no one was to be admitted during the last ten minutes of the film. The film had also hinted at a surprise climax, and audiences were understandably eager to see what the surprise climax was.

Then the movie played. At first, the reaction wasn’t that overwhelming, with small guffaws heard when Michael’s first line of dialogue was spoken. As the film progressed, the guffaws increased in volume, eventually resulting in theater-wide laughter and catcalling from everyone watching, including lead actress Diane Mahree. Seven-year-old Jackie Neyman, hearing the voice of a middle-aged woman coming out of her character’s mouth, burst into tears. Bob Guidry, who had wanted to see his name on the big screen his entire life, snuck out of the film before the end credits rolled. Even Warren, whose character comes across as an obnoxious and abrasive personality early on, had to slink into his seat from embarrassment.

The film was a financial and critical failure. Warren, who had promised to pay his crew with part of the profits of the theatrical run, couldn’t afford the payments after all. The film only had a few more drive-in screenings before Warren completely distanced himself from the project and his filmmaking career. While he wrote a novel, Forever and Always, and attempted to send an adaptation of it to HBO in 1983, it was rejected. Warren would die in 1985 of lung cancer, and the film, which no one cared about, would be lost to the sands of time.

That is, until 1992. That year, the film was found once again amongst a stack of tapes inside offices at Comedy Central. Frank Conniff, who found the film, was a writer and commentator for the popular show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a man and his robot companions are forced to watch terrible historical B-movies, taunting them as they go along. The show would include Manos among its titles in the 1993 season four finale, with their take on the cultural flop creating a large audience celebrating the film’s bizarre and unique nature. The film’s popularity exploded over the next few decades, even resulting in a name drop on the popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother during the episode “Ten Sessions,” in which Josh Radnor’s Ted takes Sarah Chalke’s Stella on a two-minute date and they watch an abridged version of the film.

In 2011, film collector Bob Solovey contacted a San Diego eBay seller auctioning off a pile of cheesy horror movies to ask if he could have two of the films from the collection. The seller responded that he could have them all. One of the prints contained in that pile was an untouched workprint of Manos, its original title, erroneously spelled Finggrs of Fate, on its spine. After reading about the search for a missing film about Napoleon, Solovey’s attitude was that every film, regardless of its quality, deserved to be preserved, and he had the opportunity to preserve the worst film ever made in original, pristine quality for others to mock for centuries to come. However, despite excitement from the Internet, he was unable to convince the Texas Film Commission to restore it. At this point, he turned to Kickstarter, where he raised almost $50,000 to hire two specialists and use a scanner equivalent to those used for Criterion restorations to help clean up the film. The final product was screened at the El Paso Plaza Classic Film Festival in 2012 and distributed on Blu-ray in 2015 for the whole world to see again.

Of course, this work was all done with the assumption that the film was in the public domain. Copyright law states that copyright notices were required before March 1, 1989, to attain protection, and no such notice appeared in the final cut. However, upon hearing about the restoration attempt and Jackie Neyman selling Manos shirts, Warren’s son, Joe, fought for what he believed was still protected intellectual property of his father. Unbelievably, a friend of his found a copy of the film’s script in the Library of Congress, meaning the film had been logged in the records with no copyright notice. A precedent like this has never existed before, but no one had the heart nor the motivation to determine if Warren’s son was still entitled to the copyright of his father’s work. Despite filing a trademark for the film, it was abandoned in 2018 due to a “failure to respond or late response,” and no major efforts to claim the film’s copyright have been made since.

Perhaps it’s for the best that the film was assumed to be in the public domain. If it hadn’t been, it most likely would have continued to be lost forever. Along with that, the cult following of the film, which it received through MST3K and its restoration, led to the creation of more projects based on the property. By 2010, a sequel titled The Search for Valley Lodge was in the works, with returning cast members from the original film directed under Rupert Talbot Munch, Sr. Unfortunately, in 2013, Jackie Neyman Jones announced that she had quit the production, stopping the film dead in its tracks despite Munch’s attempts to claim ownership of the Manos estate. However, her Kickstarter campaign for the creation of another official sequel, titled Manos Returns, was a success, with Jackie, her father Tom, Diane Mahree, and Bryan Jennings as a sheriff all reprising their roles. The film was completed in 2016. In 2018, an official prequel, “Manos” The Rise of Torgo, with Neyman Jones playing the role of the Master, was released for purchase or rental on Amazon, and in 2020, Manos Returns also became available for purchase or rental. In 2012, an 8-bit video game adaptation of the movie, also called Manos: The Hands of Fate, was released on iOS devices and eventually ported to Microsoft and Android devices. The film’s soundtrack is even available to purchase on Bandcamp. Despite Joe Warren’s attempt to claim full ownership of his father’s work, it’s clear that the passion of both crewmembers and the film’s cult fanbase have created some fun, intriguing, and bizarre projects that allow those people to embrace this film’s absolute strangeness, none of which would have been possible if the film wasn’t assumed to be in the public domain. Even the film’s popularity wouldn’t have been possible had it been found to have fallen under copyright. In the end, Harold P. Warren won his bet -- he made a feature film, and despite the fact that it only became popular posthumously, it was absolutely successful.

'Manos: The Hands Of Fate': Carefully Restoring The Opposite Of A Masterpiece: NPR

The Worst Movie Ever Made | EW.com

Stirling Silliphant Pt. 01 Writing for Disaster Films - YouTube

1968 | Oscars.org | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Talk to the Hand episode 10 - Tom Neyman - YouTube

Mimosa 18, pages 35-38. "The Hand That Time Forgot" by Richard Brandt

The Battle Over the Worst Movie Ever | Playboy (from archive.org)

Mimosa 30, pages 42-43. "Growing Up Manos" by Richard Brandt

Uncut: Diane Mahree | 'Manos' in HD

MANOS: The Restoration by Ben Solovey — Kickstarter

the press release | 'Manos' in HD

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