Although it seems as if he’d like to do everything he can to disown it and pretend that it doesn’t exist, Oliver Stone’s 1974 directing debut, the low-budget horror film Seizure, is nothing to be ashamed of. It may not be the best film he’s ever made, but it’s certainly not the worst either (U-Turn anyone?).

In terms of cult movie catnip, Seizure boasts stars like Jonathan Frid (“Barnabas Collins” from TV’s Dark Shadows), B-movie queen Mary Woronov, Bond girl Martine Beswick and Hervé Villechaize, the dwarf actor who played “Tattoo” on Fantasy Island (Villechaize, a well-known actor in NYC experimental theater circles, was Stone’s roommate at the time). Frid plays a horror writer who is terrorized by his own fictional creations. The surreal plot that is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf.

Here’s what the VHS cover looked like:
 

 
Mary Woronov claims that one of the film’s producers was gangster Michael Thevis, who anonymously bankrolled the film to launder money while he was under investigation by the FBI, something also mentioned on IMDB.

Seizure has never come out on DVD, but in the early 80s, it was easy to find on VHS for $2.99. According to Mary Woronov, Stone bought the rights to the film and it would appear that he intends to keep sitting on it. It’s easy enough to find, of course, if you know where to look. Ahem.
 

 
Hervé Villechaize, famous to all Americans during the 1970s and 1980s as a malevolent twerp in The Man with the Golden Gun and most particularly as “Tattoo” on the long-running ABC television series Fantasy Island, was a pretty interesting dude. His thick French accent and vaguely exotic countenance suggested a pint-sized “Most Interesting Man in the World” type years before the Dos Equis ad campaign. The truth wasn’t that far off: despite the physical handicap of “proportionate” dwarfism, Villechaize studied art at the Beaux-Arts school in Paris and had a successful exhibition after his graduation. He moved to Manhattan in 1964 and worked as an artist, painter and photographer. He acted in a Sam Shepard play, in Oliver Stone’s directorial debut Seizure, in Conrad Rook’s Chappaqua (with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg), and (much later) in Richard Elfman’s delirious avant-garde cult movie Forbidden Zone.

Villechaize was infamous for constantly macking on his female co-workers, and he dated his fellow Forbidden Zone actor Susan Tyrrell, who told Michael Musto in 1983, “Herve’s a brilliant man, hilarious sense of humor, who’s very paranoid. He carried a gun and a long knife all the time. I loved him very much. You ask any woman he’s been with—he’s a very sexual man. He knows what to do!”

Sadly, Hervé Villechaize took his own life in 1993.

Incredibly, another woman in his life was Greta Garbo. In late 2012 a painting went up for auction with the following description:
 

An acrylic on panel painting of white and yellow flowers on a green background, with three embedded circular mirrors. Signed lower left “Hervé Villechaize.” Given by the actor to Greta Garbo as a gift.

 
Here is that painting:
 

 
Not many people know that Garbo herself tried her hand at painting as well. In the same auction, these two canvases by Garbo went up for sale:
 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Herve Villechaize painting Bettie Page

 
When Herve painted Bettie - an animated gif from The Forbidden Zone.
 
Via The Televandelist.