8/21/23
Newsletter #434
The Crack of Dawn
Back to the exciting adventures in the “Ghoul Trench.” In Hercules in the Underworld (as well as in his underwear), Hercules goes to the underworld where he encounters all varieties of crazy, evil creatures. Eventually he finds his way into the Ghoul Trench, which is the worst, scariest, freakiest part of the underworld, and that’s really bad. The main unit director (whose name I avoided yesterday because I thought I was being a nice guy, then I realized, “Hey, wait, I’m not really that nice of a guy”), Bill Norton (aka B.W.L. Norton, so as not to be confused with screenwriter father, William Norton, who wrote the Burt Reynolds films, White Lightning [1973] and Gator [1976]), had already shot the Ghoul Trench in an oddly sterile, clean fashion – Hercules walking through a rocky corridor with dry ice smoke floating on the ground, but that’s it – there was no set decoration. The sets looked sparkling clean and empty, so no matter how many ghouls you might have, it just wasn’t scary looking. Worse still, it looked a lot like a cheap movie set. Rob, Universal, everybody objected. It was to be reshot.
Fabulous director that I am, the first thing that I did was to make it other people’s problems. I first met with the production designer, Mick Straun. Mick was American and his office was next to mine. He was the most severe Deadhead I’ve ever met. All of his cassette tapes were live recordings of the Grateful Dead that he had made all over the country and the tapes only had dates on them. And that’s all that Mick played for weeks during pre-production, and we all had to listen to it. Of course, I finally objected, and he began allowing me to put on other music, but only occasionally. Anyway, Mick was cool. So, I said to him, “Art direct the shit out of the Ghoul Trench. I want vines, moss, cobwebs, carnivorous plants, slime, goo bubbling out of cracks, anything you can think of.” Mick said he’d suggested something like that to the former director, but was turned down. I told him to lay it on thick, and he did, and it looks terrific.
This scene had become more than just reshooting a scene that hadn’t turned out well. It was now to show Universal Studios that the show hadn’t gone off the rails, which it had – the director had gotten on a plane and left – and everything was firmly under control.
Enter the 2nd unit. Earlier, when I said, “my 2nd unit,” what I really meant was, “Charlie’s 2nd unit that I was temporarily directing.” Charlie Haskell and I had started the 2nd unit department on the first film, Hercules and the Amazon Women, with Roma Downey and Lucy Lawless (pre-Xena). Charlie was from the very bottom of the South Island of New Zealand, was sort of a round blond guy, and made his own clothes, which I admire. At the very beginning, he and I came to loggerheads right away. I said, “Charlie, this is my 2nd unit.” He said, “No, mate, it’s not, it’s mine. You are the first of four directors. You guys come and go. We stay. It’s my second unit.” He had me. I said, “All right, I’ll grant you that. But I’m the director, I do all the directing, and don’t ever call ‘Action’ again.” Charlie smiled and said, “Some directors like it. I won’t do it.” I said, “Or ‘cut.’ Only I say, ‘cut.’” He generously acquiesced.
Where was I? Oh, the fucking Ghoul Trench. Right. I also had to display for everybody with this stupid scene that I could handle main unit – except that I shot the scene with the 2nd unit. Eighteen people as opposed to a hundred people. We kicked ass. Hats off to the DP, Rick Allender.
OK. It’s taken me two days to simply get to the idea that sparked this memory in the first place. The set of the Ghoul Trench. Although I was using the same fake rock set walls on the same stage, this time the art department was let loose with orders to slime the shit out of everything. Big cobwebs, bubbling goo, moss, vines, shrubs. Meanwhile, since this was considered “main unit” (we had Kevin Sorbo, and if you’ve got the lead, your main unit), so I got twenty ghouls, which looked suspiciously like zombies, and were given heavy-duty makeup jobs that really looked terrific.
OK. So, I had all of this terrific activity around me – a big set being dressed by many people in the art department, carpenters adding fountains of bubbling goo, twenty ghoul extras being dressed — I’ve got the whole thing storyboarded. I pleasantly got to sit and watch, and it was going to take a few hours to pull it all together, but that was Charlie’s problem, now wasn’t it? It was his 2nd unit, after all. I just got to wait for my turn to actually direct the scene. I was mainly on Steadicam for the whole scene, and it and the operator were ready.
So, that’s when this short guy in a green army coat wearing a backward baseball cap, dropped into the chair beside me, slumping in his seat. He said his name was Jack Perez and he was the next 2nd unit director. Well, this was a good scene to see how all this shit was done. Within minutes – and this hasn’t happened to me too many times in my life – Jack and I were best friends. This was 1994, damn near 30 years ago. Jack knows his shit, Jack knows his movies, and I would come to find out that Jack is a really good director. He’s from New York City. He’s a little Cuban-Jewish guy that doesn’t take shit from anyone, and he sure knew his WWII movies. We discussed Battleground (1949), which we both liked, particularly when Ricardo Montalban who is from L.A. and has never seen snow freezes to death. I somehow knew that we would be friends forever. Forever being the key word.
Except now Jack won’t talk to me. He won’t take my calls, he won’t respond to me. I called him a bad screenwriter and he won’t forgive me. I don’t think anybody knows how to write a script, so I’m not picking on him. Nor does it matter. What I do know is that Jack is a good director, and that’s a lot.
Anway, that’s why I thought of the Ghoul Trench. That’s where I met Jack Perez, who won’t talk to me anymore. Perhaps mentioning it here will help, although I don’t know why.
It is dawn yet again.