STECKLER: So I went to Long Beach to shoot this movie [The World’s Greatest Sinner] with 200 extras smashing up the Coliseum; it was wild, and we did some crazy things. (If you ever get to see the movie, you’ll see.) But it was not a great movie by any means. Timothy Carey had some great ideas but he lacked technique; he didn’t know how to put them together. But it was good experience, because I met other people and worked in the business from that point on.

He got the money from Mike Ripps, who had made Poor White Trash. Very successful film! Mike took a movie that nobody wanted, added 3 minutes of a girl running through a swamp semi-nude, and called it Poor White Trash. Three weeks later he released it and the theaters were packed! It just goes to show that if you have an idea, you can still pull it off.

BOYD: What was the movie originally called?

STECKLER:  The Bayou [sic]. The leading actor was Peter Graves from Mission Impossible; Carey was in it, too. After Ripps renamed it Poor White Trash, for years it was like the Deep Throat of horror movies [ed. note: It’s not a horror movie, though…]! So Tim got the money to make his one and only movie – never could put another one together after that.

– Ray Dennis Steckler, interviewed by Boyd Rice in Re/Search #10: Incredibly Strange Films (V/Search Publications, 1986)