Finally found out where I read about Rob shooting 30 mins worth of film:

'Grindhouse' filler becomes the choice bit
Guest directors Rob Zombie, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright bring sleaze to their mock film trailers.
By Mark Olsen, Special to The Times

Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse Festival celebrates cheesy films
Do not be fooled into heading for the bathroom or concession stand during the "intermission" that breaks up the double-billed features that make up "Grindhouse" — "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof."

Perhaps the craftiest trick pulled off by writer-directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino in creating their much anticipated, self-conscious throwback to the heady days of low-rent theaters, scratched prints and the all-scuzz, all-the-time exploitation ethos is the false movie trailers that make up the intermission reel.

The filmmakers enlisted the likes of Rob Zombie ("The Devil's Rejects"), Edgar Wright ("Shaun of the Dead") and Eli Roth ("Hostel") when it became clear they were too bogged down with finishing their features to take on the trailers as well.

Rodriguez recalled Zombie's pitch: "He goes, 'It's called 'Werewolf Women of the SS.' I said, 'Say no more. Go shoot it.' "

And shoot he did. While all three trailers were shot in just two days apiece, Wright and Roth essentially shot only what ended up on screen. Zombie estimates that he had enough footage to make a solid half-hour movie and was particularly pained to whittle it down.

Zombie assembled quite a cast for his mini-movie, including Udo Kier and Sybil Danning, B-movie character actors Bill Moseley and Tom Towles, and his wife, Sheri Moon Zombie. Best of all, however, is an appearance by Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu.

How exactly one gets from Nazi scientists to topless superwomen, machine-gunning werewolves to Fu Manchu remains delightfully obscure in the trailer, and that confusion is not only intentional but, as Zombie explains, a tip of the hat to exploitation convention.

"I was getting very conceptual in my own mind with it," he says. "A lot of these movies, they would be made cheaply. The real famous Nazi-type movie, 'Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,' was made on the leftover sets from 'Hogan's Heroes.' That's why that movie, for a cheap exploitation film, it looks pretty nice.

"A lot of times these movies would be made like, 'Well, you know, I've got a whole bunch of Nazi uniforms, but I got this Chinese set too. We'll put 'em together!' They start jamming things in there, so I took that approach."

Zombie, Wright and Roth all express their appreciation and admiration for Rodriguez and Tarantino, not only as filmmakers, but for creating the "Grindhouse" project in the spirit of dementedly rekindling the lively, night-out fun of old-time moviegoing.

Yet for "Grindhouse" to really capture the spirit of the original grind houses, the seedy, run-down movie theaters that would show wild and relentless releases truly devoid of any redeeming values, the filmmakers had to take it down a few notches and be sure to connect with the lowlifes and the squalor. They needed the merely odd to become the truly outrageous.

"To me the only thing missing from our grind-house movies is they are not quite sleazy enough," says Tarantino of "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof."

The mock trailers, however, are something else.

"These guys brought the sleaze factor. They are coming from a sleaze place that me and Robert did not come from, but that needed to be there for the picture to be proper."

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