5/30/23
Newsletter #352
The Crack of Dawn
Besides being directors and actors and writers, Bruce and I are both producers. Having started in low-budget indies, we’re both exceedingly aware of how a film production works. Since Bruce and Sam and I came to filmmaking from an “Old Hollywood” perspective – most specifically, the Three Stooges – our approach has always been, “What’s a cool way to fake it?”
Honestly, I’m not knocking digital effects, which used properly can be really great. The missing legs of Captain Dan (Gary Sinese), or the ping pong balls against the wall as Forrest hits them with paddles in both hands in Forrest Gump (1994) are both wonderful. CGI is just one more tool in your toolbox. But if you can figure out how to do it on the set while you’re shooting, it’s just cooler.
I picked up a trick in The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) that I’ve used about a dozen times. In that movie a stuntman comes rolling down the steps, disappears behind a couch, and Peter Sellers stands up, saying, “That felt good.”
I used an old Hollywood makeup trick in Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur (1994) that tickles me every time I see it because it’s so simple and so old. Three guys have their backs to us. The minotaur pops up, and using his razor-sharp claws swipes them across their faces. They all turn around toward the lens screaming, revealing bloody awful cuts on their faces, which, of course, were already there.
Anyway, we have sort of an old-fashioned approach to filmmaking, and part of that aesthetic, if you will, is “it’s fake,” and if you don’t take advantage of that, you’re being foolish. Bruce and Sam and I had this part figured out by the time we were 18. If there’s a way to fake it, fake it; movies are not about realism, because there isn’t any. Once you’ve filmed it it’s not real anymore; it’s fake. And audiences like to be faked out.
So, from the time the Hollywood studio system got going in 1913, up to about 1970, movies and TV were made a certain way. For the most part, it was 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and damn near nobody actually shot night for night – you faked it, and everybody just went with it because that’s how movies were made. In one of my favorite movies, William Wyler’s The Big Country (1958), which is as A of a movie as you can get, with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, for goodness’ sake, the actors are actually riding horses across this incredible location. But when they stop at night and eat beans around the fire, that’s in a studio, on a set, and it’s lit to look like nighttime, but it isn’t, it’s fake.
That’s how all of the productions down in New Zealand, like Hercules and Xena, were run. Work hours are 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and if you’re shooting a night scene, you’re faking it. This allows the cast and crew to have lives. Shooting at night is stupid.
Somewhere along the way the fakery aspect of filmmaking has gotten lost. And the limitation of the 12-hour day got lost, too. Since in Hollywood you can simply pay more money to go into overtime, they just do it. Most days are 14-hours, many are 16-hours. You can’t get anything good from a human being after 14 hours, it’s impossible, and it’s a form of torture.
Even TV shows now shoot night for night – taking 16-hours to do it – and it’s the world’s stupidest fucking idea. Quickly, movies have this thing called “turnaround,” meaning, if you work for 12-hours, you get 12-hours off. Let’s just say that of your 8-day schedule, you have one night. So, if you start at 7:00 PM, shoot all night, then finish at 7:00 AM – everybody gets 12-hours turnaround – and you’re back at starting at 7:00 PM and shooting all night, whether you like it or not. If, however, you want to go back to shooting days, 12 hours must get lost somewhere. There are ways to try and cheat this, using splits, which are half-day, half-night, but it’s still fucked. The point is, scheduling to shoot at night sucks, and shooting at night sucks, and in most cases, you don’t need to, so why do that to yourself? All you have to do is fake it. There is no inherent reality in darkness. Whether the darkness is on a sound-stage or the planets align and darkness ensues, the result is the same.
I saw a clip of a reasonably present-day Ellen Burstyn being interviewed about The Exorcist (1973). It was a very legitimate interview, but she was getting the standardest of standard questions, that are, for the most part, just plain old stupid. One question was, “Did you have any idea that it would be so scary?” Ms. Burstyn looked truly flummoxed and said, “You know that it was based on a huge, bestselling book?” And I don’t think the guy did. I read the book and it scared the shit out of me, and I’m not Catholic. Everybody figured that it was going to be a scary movie, but nobody thought that the director, William Friedkin, who was hot shit at that moment from directing The French Connection (1971, Oscar-winner for Best Picture), would do such an amazingly terrific and serious job. Ellen Burstyn still seemed a tad surprised at Friedkin’s seriousness.
But the really stupid question, that I am forever asked regarding Evil Dead, is “Does it scare you?”
No. Once it’s all edited together it’s supposed to turn into a flowing experience for the viewer, and hopefully it does. But it really can’t be for the people who made it. Every shot – from the second the camera turns on until it turns off – is an ordeal, and there are 500 to 1,000 shots in a movie.
The sun is up, and it’s already a beautiful, late spring day.
It’s almost summer.
I think I’m going to go to Berkeley, California.