A Top 40 radio pioneer made this giant lizard movie

The Giant Gila Monster was made in 1959 in the Dallas area, and it is a monster movie financed by Gordon McLendon, the Texas radio man credited with perfecting the Top 40 format. Top 40 is the radio format built around the most popular records of the moment. The man who helped set that sound in motion also wanted something to play at his drive-in theaters, and this was one of the results.

The story is small and direct. A giant lizard is loose in a Texas town, and people keep disappearing. A hard-working teenager named Chase Winstead helps the sheriff investigate. He ends the monster by crashing a hot rod loaded with explosive into it. It runs 74 minutes and stops there.

Why a radio man made a monster movie

McLendon began in radio in 1946, when he bought a station in Palestine, Texas. He moved to Dallas the next year and started KLIF, which he turned into one of the first Top 40 stations. He and his father also founded the Liberty Broadcasting System in 1947 to carry his baseball broadcasts. He could not afford live coverage of many games, so he re-created them on air from wire reports, using sound effects and the on-air name The Old Scotchman. By 1952 Liberty had 458 stations and was the second largest radio network in the United States.

His family also owned drive-in and conventional movie theaters, and he wanted co-features to run alongside his main attractions. In 1959 he made three B movies: The Killer Shrews, The Giant Gila Monster and My Dog Buddy. The first two were shot back to back and played together as a double feature.

The people who made it

One producer was Ken Curtis, the actor who played Festus on Gunsmoke, the long-running television western. The AFI Catalog, the American Film Institute's record of US films, lists McLendon as financial backer and executive producer. It dates the Dallas premiere to June 25, 1959, and notes that the outdoor scenes were shot in Cielo, Texas.

Ray Kellogg directed, in exchange for handling the special effects. He served in the Navy in World War II with the OSS Field Photographing Branch, the wartime US intelligence service's film unit. He was also an effects artist who later headed the effects unit at 20th Century Fox, and in 1968 he co-directed The Green Berets with John Wayne and Mervyn LeRoy. Don Sullivan, the young star who also appeared in The Monster of Piedras Blancas, is credited with the film's songs, chosen with teenage audiences in mind.

The radio connection runs through the cast, too. Ken Knox, who plays the disc jockey Horatio Alger "Steamroller" Smith, was a real disc jockey at McLendon's Texas stations. A Variety review noted that the radio station heard in the film was a real Houston station that McLendon owned.

How the monster was made

The creature is not a Gila monster at all. It is a Mexican beaded lizard, a similar and usually larger species, filmed on a scaled-down model landscape so that it looks enormous.

Regional drive-in films of the South usually stayed regional. This pair received national and foreign distribution.

Where it fits on Relay

Relay streams 324 movies from the 1950s in the United States, and 55 of them are horror films. The Giant Gila Monster is among them, and it shows another side of the decade's creature features: films built for a drive-in lot by someone who knew how to sell to teenagers.

The film suits viewers who like 1950s monster movies, drive-in history, or the odd story of how a radio innovator ended up producing a lizard attack.

Horror