He took a high-floor room at Hollywood’s Knickerbocker Hotel and sent a suicide message to the LA Times.
Two reporters went to Tucker’s room to hear his story. Tucker told them how he had turned down $300,000 to direct a bio-pic about gangster Lucky Luciano and chose instead to finance Robot Monster. "The biggest mistake of my life."
The reporters talked him out of suicide.
Tucker went on to direct eight more low-budget movies. He became a successful editor of TV’s One Step Beyond & Wonder Woman. He was the post-production supervisor of the 1976 King Kong, Orca The Killer Whale and others.
Moral of the story: Stay away from the Knickerbocker Hotel because King Kong is coming soon, to save the day.
Special Note: Award winning film composer Elmer Bernstein did the score for Robot Monster as well as Cat Women of the Moon. Three years later, he was scoring Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments. Bernstein went on to work on 171 movies including The Magnificent 7 and the groundbreaking, both in score and story, The Man with the Golden Arm starring Frank Sinatra.
But your story of Phil Tucker shows us that sometimes when we are in the worst possible fix we can work our way out with a little persistence. I can't imagine not being qualified to be theater usher. Tucker's story is a good lesson for everyone.
I remember going to see at least one of those sensational 3D movies back then. Those cardboard 3D glasses with green plastic lens on one side and red plastic on the other, working together to give an impression of three dimensions, but not color. I seem to recall a movie with an arrow flying out into the audience. Perhaps a Western theme with Indians shooting arrows. But I don't think my mother would have allowed us go to a movie called Robot Monster. Not because it was an awful movie, but certainly as I've always thought, infamy often sells much better than reality. That's just the way it is. Too bad that Tucker didn't get a slice of that money that the distributor got. An old story.
Ron