6/20/23
Newsletter #373
The Crack of Dawn
I was telling the story of the creation of the Super-8 film, The Blind Waiter. But first I need to back up a little to explain how Scott and I ended up working together.
Back in junior high, Scott had his own little movie machine grinding out pictures. He had a bunch of buddies, all Three Stooges fans, who would get together on weekends and remake Three Stooges films. Over a few years, Scott made about 20 or more of these films (he always got to play Moe, of course), and they were fairly complicated in their own way. Along the way Bruce and Sam joined the troupe. I was never involved in the productions, but I did get to see the films – at parties and at school – and they were funny, and clever, and I was envious.
I made a number of Super-8 movies at that same time, but none of them seemed all that funny or clever to me. When we were 17 years old, Sam, who lived around the block from me, and I were both out taking separate walks and randomly encountered each other. We walked all over our little town of Franklin talking movies. Sam told me about a film he had just made with Scott called Six Months to Live (1976). They were now co-directing and co-writing. At the end of our walk we stopped at his house, he showed me the movie, and I laughed my ass off. I said, “We’ve got to make movies together.” Sam, showing great wisdom in his youth, replied, “Write a script.”
So I did. It was called The Case of the Topanga Pearl. I made it in one weekend with Sam, Scott and Ellen Sandweiss, then I promptly moved to Hollywood. As I mentioned yesterday, when I returned everything had changed. Sam and Scott were no longer working together. Sam had formed a company with Bruce and Rob, but not Scott, to make a horror film, which was Evil Dead. I worked on the film, but Scott didn’t. Obviously, something had come down between Sam and Scott and they’d gone their separate ways. Honestly, I didn’t care about their problems.
When we returned from Tennessee where we shot Evil Dead, without Scott, Scott had put together a production of his own horror film called Night Crew (1980). I was not invited to work on it, so I didn’t. Nor did I particularly care. It sounded like a perfectly OK idea for a low-budget horror movie, I just didn’t give a shit about low-budget horror movies and had just returned from making one. Scott, meanwhile, had been shooting for weeks, maybe even a few months, and he was struggling to get it done. Scott had written the script and was directing, but sadly didn’t know how to produce and wasn’t getting much help. So Scott called me, which was probably the first time he ever did, and asked if I would help him complete Night Crew. I said sure. I ended up shooting and lighting the last few scenes, then helping Scott with the post-production, and he finished the film (and would go on to remake it later as a feature called Intruder [1989]).
I’ve taken the long way around to telling the story of shooting The Blind Waiter. Scott and I had come up with an idea and written it, and had had no trouble at all. But when it came to the production, his approach was to just leave it to fate and see what happens. That’s not a good plan. I had this crazy idea that we could shoot the entire 15-page script in two nights, and Scott believed me, but he had no idea how that would be accomplished. I wasn’t quite sure either, so I asked Bruce if he would co-produce, and he agreed. Together, he and I figured out how we would do it, then we made a schedule, prop lists, costume lists, etc.
The co-producing part hadn’t worked out, so I tried even harder to make the co-directing part work. I’d never co-directed, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to me – people need to know who is in charge. Nevertheless, there’s more to directing than that. Like my man, Alfred Hitchcock, I was an adherent of storyboarding, and I drew crude little drawings of every shot. As many times as I asked him, which was many, Scott would not have anything to do with storyboards. So, I conceived and drew them all. During production, I operated the camera, and Scott played the part of the incompetent chef. And knowing that I was taking on too many jobs, I called Tim Philo, who had just shot Evil Dead, and he came in and lit a lot of the film.
The production line system that Bruce and I devised worked perfectly – because that’s the way movies are made; we didn’t devise anything; we just did it properly. Unless Scott was in the scene, he was never there where I was shooting. Instead, and it’s really important, particularly on a comedy, and ultra-particularly on a night shoot, Scott kept the whole cast laughing. When it came time to shoot their scenes, they were in all in upbeat, funny moods.
Movie scheduling is just like this, but somebody is often going to get screwed. On this film it was Sam, and Bruce and I didn’t do it on purpose, but someone has to go last. Sam had been as patient as was humanly possible. Now we woke him up out of a dead sleep, shoved him straight into a wacky, wild, goofball comedy, and shot all of his scenes in a row. Luckily for Sam, he always looks like he was just woken up, and because he’s a pro he pulled off his schticks, but to me he looks brain dead.
Scott and I were able to get our mojo back during editing. I assembled the whole film, which went together better than any movie I had ever made previously. I then handed it over to Scott, and he trimmed it all down and made it as snappy as it could be. It’s 16-minutes long, and it came out pretty well. Bruce is great, as always. And it was good enough for me and Scott to immediately decide to make another comedy short. Only this time we were going to splurge and shoot in 16mm.
love this! hope you're enjoying your travels