Brandon Hall Goes Hocus Poking

I’ll start off by saying that I’m a huge horror movie buff, so I never pass up an opportunity to go to a convention when they’re close. This year, I attended the HorrorFind Weekend convention on September 26th in Hunt Valley, Maryland. One of the guests on the list was Doug Jones, who we BetteHeads know played Billy in Hocus Pocus. I was standing in line to meet him and I noticed that he had a picture of his character, Billy, to be autographed.

So, when I got up to the table I mentioned to him that I was a big Bette Midler fan, so of course, I had to get the picture from Hocus Pocus. He looked at me kind of puzzled and asked what got me into Bette and I told him that it was actually Hocus Pocus that introduced me to her. He went on to tell me that he was also a big Bette Midler fan and looked around at the crowd gathering behind me and said “Okay, I have to tell you a quick Bette Midler story.”

He told me that he was working as the “Mac Tonight” character in a McDonald’s commercial. I didn’t remember this commercial, but he said that the character had a moon shaped head. Maybe some of you older readers will remember this better. But, anyway, he said that he was an actor stuck playing this character in a McDonald’s commercial and it wasn’t exactly the high point of his career.

While in the middle of filming this series of commercials, he saw a Bette interview with Barbara Walters where Barbara asked Bette what has changed with her in the past 10 years since she last interviewed her and Bette said “I just don’t care anymore.” So, Doug told me that he thought this was great advice and used that motto when he was stuck in jobs that weren’t exactly glamorous.

When he was working with Bette on the set of Hocus Pocus, he got to thank her for that inspiration and Bette said “Did I say that? That was good, wasn’t it?” That sounded like a Bette response to me!

Then it came time for him to sign the photo for me and I asked if he could write “Go to hell!” on it since that was one of the lines that he said to Bette in the movie. He looked at me kind of shocked again and said “But, I don’t wanna say ”˜Go to hell!’ to you”¦ how about I put quotation marks around it?” Then we quoted some more lines from the movie and he was impressed that I knew them.

I guess I forgot to tell him that I’ve only seen the movie 901 times. Overall, he was a very nice guy. He often works under heavy make-up, so you may not know that he has a pretty lengthy resume. He was also in Hellboy 1 and 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, and he played the Silver Surfer in the second Fantastic Four movie”¦ among many, many other things. We will all, of course, remember him as Billy Butcherson, Winnie’s unfaithful boyfriend.