Dick Miller

For the American basketball player, see Dick Miller (basketball).

Dick Miller
Miller in A Bucket of Blood (1959)
Born	Richard Miller December 25, 1928 (1928-12-25) (age 82) The Bronx, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1955–present

Richard "Dick" Miller (born December 25, 1928) is an American character actor who has appeared in over 100 films, particularly those produced by Roger Corman, and later in films of directors who started their careers with Corman, including James Cameron and Joe Dante, with the distinction of appearing in every film made by Dante. Miller's main roles have been in films such as Gremlins, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Piranha, The Howling, Bucket of Blood, The Little Shop of Horrors and Small Soldiers.

Life and career

Miller was born in The Bronx, New York and attended the City College of New York as well as Columbia University.^[1] He performed on Broadway and also worked at the Bellevue Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic and the psychiatric department of Queens General Hospital.^[1] In 1952, he moved to California seeking work as a writer.

His roles in movies include White Line Fever, The Terminator, All The Right Moves, Night of the Creeps, Small Soldiers, It Conquered the World, Bucket of Blood, The Little Shop of Horrors, the Tales from the Crypt movie Demon Knight, Amazon Women on the Moon, Chopping Mall, The Howling, Piranha and I Wanna Hold Your Hand. His best known role was in the movies Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch as Murray Futterman. He appeared in Pulp Fiction as Monster Joe, but his scene and a few others were deleted because of the length of the film.

His television credits include V: The Final Battle as Dan Pascal, and appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the season 1 episode "The Big Goodbye" as the newspaper stand man in the holodeck, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the season 3 two-part episode "Past Tense" as Vin, Time of Your Life, and he voiced the gangster Chuckie Sol in the animated feature film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Miller has also directed television shows, including "The Fix" a 1986 episode of the series Miami Vice.

In 2000, Miller was featured alongside former collaborators including Roger Corman, Sam Arkoff and Peter Bogdanovich in the documentary SCHLOCK! The Secret History of American Movies, a film about the rise and fall of American exploitation cinema.

Walter Paisley

Walter Paisley is the name of several fictional characters portrayed by Miller. As Miller notes, "I've played Walter Paisley five times now, I think."^[2]

As of 2011, the character name has actually appeared seven times on film, with Miller providing six of these portrayals:

The name first appeared in the Roger Corman film A Bucket of Blood. In that film, Paisley is a busboy who becomes an artist of sorts by killing his subjects and covering them in clay.^[3] In 1976, Miller once again played a character named Walter Paisley—this time a talent agent—in another Corman production, Hollywood Boulevard, directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante.

Dante cast Miller as another character named Walter Paisley in the 1981 film The Howling.^[4] This time, Paisley is the owner of an occult bookshop. Two years later, the name popped up again for another Miller character, the owner of a diner in the third segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie.^[5] 1986's Chopping Mall featured a janitor named Walter Paisley, and the 1994 made-for-TV remake of Shake, Rattle and Rock! had Miller playing a character named Officer Paisley. In 1995, A Bucket of Blood was remade, with Anthony Michael Hall as Walter Paisley.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Dick Miller Biography - Yahoo! Movies
2. ^ Alan Frank, The Films of Roger Corman: ‘shooting My Way Out of Trouble’ (BT Batsford, 1998), [1].
3. ^ David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (McFarland, 1997), 221.
4. ^ Reynold Humphries, The American Horror Film: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 133.
5. ^ John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1980s (McFarland & Co., 2007), 364.

External links

• Dick Miller at the Internet Movie Database
• Dick Miller at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
• Biography on (re)Search my Trash