Herbert Tevos(1896-1988)

Herbert Tevos has long been something of a mystery in Hollywood. He is known to have written some unused scripts and is said to have taken pride in omitting any kind of unnecessary subplots or deviations from the central idea, which explains the bare-bones proceedings of the one script credit he got--for a film called "Tarantula". That film (not to be confused with the Jack Arnold film of the same name [Tarantula (1955)]) was filmed in 1951, but deemed unreleasable by the producers. However, it was picked up in 1952 by producer/director--and low-budget specialist--Ron Ormond, who filmed new material, edited it into "Tarantula" and the result, now renamed Mesa of Lost Women (1953), is often considered to be one of the worst movies ever made.

According to people who worked on the film, interviewed by film historian Tom Weaver, the German-born Tevos claimed to have been a major director in Germany, and to have directed Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930). According to Tandra Quinn, who played the spider woman Tarantella, Tevos had tried to make the unknown Quinn his protégé, telling her he was going to make her a star, even coming up with part of her stage name. In Weaver's book "I Talked with a Zombie", Quinn recalls: "He tried to be my Svengali, and kinda dominate my every move. He wanted to make this exotic character out of me, and came up with the screen name 'Tandra Nova' for me". Herbert Tevos never made another film in Hollywood, nor is there any record of a Herbert Tevos working on anything in Germany.

However, Tevos' son has revealed that his real name was Herbert von Schoellenbach, and that he had worked for the film manufacturer Agfa in Germany, and it was Agfa that brought him to the US. According to the files of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Schoellenbach was head of the paper testing department at Agfa Ansco in Binghampton, NY. The Institute's Professor emeritus Ira Current recalls, "At our gatherings Schoellenbach regaled us with his biography; his experiences as a motion picture cameraman, his expeditions to the Amazon, and his association with [Manfred von Richthofen], the World War I German aviation ace. He had been the cameraman on an expedition up the Amazon River when everyone became ill with fever. He was able to escape, alone, back to civilization but had buried several thousand meters of exposed motion film in the jungle." Bill Warren and Bill Thomas in their book "Keep Watching the Skies" claim that Schoellenbach had a "long connection with filmmaking", but don't elaborate further, stating that "Tarantula" / "Mesa of Lost Women" is his only known movie credit.

The German National archives do actually list him as one of the people having had correspondence with Karl Vollmöller, who wrote the screenplay for "The Blue Angel", so there might be some grain of truth to Schoellenbach's involvement, however minuscule, in that movie. Under the Freedom of Information Act, there was released a notification of a report made by the FBI Alien Enemy Control in 1942, of the detention of a Herbert von Schoellenbach for interrogation in Los Angeles, which means he was apparently living there by that time. The documents give no further information. As a pointer of what he might have been doing after "Tarantula" tanked, there's an archive of the "Annual Reports of Yellowstone National Park Superintendents", that lists "Herbert von Schoellenbach, cameraman of the General Photo Sales corporation" as one of the "distinguished guests" at the park in 1957.