STEP RIGHT UP!

From the producer who brought you Rosemary's Baby--and almost didn't live through it. All his life this director/actor/playwright yearned to scare people, but it was only after dictatorial Harry Cohn of Columbia finally kicked off that Castle really got to do his stuff: electrically shocking our rear ends in Tingler, or insuring us for $1,000 if we died of fright during Macabre, or refunding the ticket price if we left our seats before the final moments of Homicidal. But Castle stood for more than PR gimmickry; no mere mortal could survive working with the difficult Welles (The Lady From Shangahi) and the equally difficult Polanski (Rosemary's Baby). In the latter case, Castle claims he nearly didn't; more than semi-seriously, he blames witches for the stroke of the movie's composer, Sharon Tate's murder, and his own near-fatal kidney stones. But what can keep a guy down who got a part in a Broadway play during the Depression by successfully impersonating Samuel Goldwyn's nephew?