6/7/23
Newsletter #360
The Crack of Dawn
When I attended Ivan Raimi’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, I was seated at the “cool” table, with Bruce Campbell and his wife, Rob Tapert (without his wife, Lucy Lawless) and Rob’s sister, Dorothy, Ted Raimi, and I don’t remember who else. Sam was seated at the kids’ table, since five of the unruly kids were his. As we had a swell time at our table, we could all see that Sam was overwhelmed by kids at his table. Finally, Sam left his table, came over to our table, and sat beside me. He then usurped the conversation of the whole table with the loud announcement, “Josh was the smartest kid in the whole neighborhood. He was always reading a book. He had seen more movies than any of us and knew more about movies than any of us.” Sam turned to me and asked, “So, how’s that going for you?” It got a big laugh.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Three Stooges were a big influence on us not only from a comedy standpoint, but from a filmmaking standpoint. A technique that the Stooges used all the time was reverse motion – play it backward. But the trick is that when you shoot it, you play the scene backward, so that when you run it forward, it doesn’t look backward. A good example is when Shemp gets punched, he does a complete roll on the ground, and ends up standing on his head. First of all, it’s a stuntman, not Shemp. The stuntman began by standing on his head, then fell forward and did a roll out of frame. Played the other way, he rolls into frame, and ends up on his head.
In two of the 16mm comedy shorts we made, Torro, Torro, Torro (1980) and Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter (1981), I put as much reverse motion into both of them as I could figure out how to do. For instance, in Torro, the story of a lawnmower gone mad and out of control, I needed the lawnmower to somehow get up onto a long table covered with pies, then fire them out. In a single shot I had a guy pounding a sign for the Franklin Bake Off into the ground, in front of the long table of pies. He sees the lawnmower coming, turns, jumps up onto the table, the sign falls down creating a ramp, and the lawnmower goes up it, then starts moving down the table. Therefore, we began with the guy on the table with the lawnmower on the table (connected to fishing line) behind him, and the sign already fallen over creating a ramp. Shooting backward, the lines were pulled, the lawnmower rolled backward off the table, down the ramp and onto the grass, somebody out of frame made the sign go back up straight, and the guy on the end of the table, with his back to us, took a step backward, jumped off the table and turned around to face us behind the upright sign. It sounded complicated as I just wrote it, but it worked like a charm.
Dissolve forward fourteen years to making Hercules in the Underworld (1994) – which we crewmembers wittily called Hercules in his Underwear, and we laughed every time. Hercules fights Cerberus the three-headed dog, which is intended to be a highlight of the film. Since it was 1994, and though digital effects existed, this was being done practically. A three-headed dog was built by KNB Effects — who built a dying buffalo in Dances With Wolves and broke James Caan’s ankles in Misery — and it was a marvel. It took about eight people to run it, with its many servo motors to make the eyes open and close, and the mouth to move, each run by an operator with a joystick, plus there were people inside it.
Our director, our fearless leader, Bill Norton, decreed, “I’m shooting the dog on main unit.” I was the 2nd unit director, and I knew all three of the KNB guys, Kurtzman, Nicotero, Burger, from the Evil Dead movies. Those are the guys who shoe-horned me into a skeleton outfit with no fly on Army of Darkness for 14 hours. No, honestly, I love those guys, and I thought I’d be shooting the dog footage with them, and that’s what they thought, but no, Bill said he was doing it on main unit.
So, me, my 2nd unit crew of fourteen people, KNB, and their eight people, all of us sat on the main unit set all day long waiting for Bill to get around to shooting the dog. Bill finally got to it at 6:00 PM, and we wrap at 7:00. KNB jumped into action. I didn’t have a thing to do with it. Me and the 2nd unit crew just watched. As the minutes clicked away, and the sweep second hand went around, KNB and co. magically got their shit together for a take. Bill had three cameras running to catch all the exciting action. Hercules (Kevin Sorbo) was supposed to take a spear and shove it into all three dogs’ mouths at the same time. Nobody was prepared for that eventuality, nor did they even try. At a point they just put it in the dogs’ mouths, as the script called for. But for now, Hercules would simply fend off Cerberus with the sideways spear.
As we neared the 7:00 PM wrap, which they were very serious about in New Zealand, bless them, Bill, the director, was going to get this big, special effects scene, in one take. I was a tad skeptical. Everybody and everything was in place, people inside the dog, at their joysticks, Kevin was all set with his spear, ready to do anything asked of him, which was look busy with this spear, and Bill called action. Kevin stepped in and gave an energetic performance with the spear, managing to never actually touch the dog. Cerberus, meanwhile, had some issues. The first and foremost was, absolutely everything went wrong: one of the heads disconnected, one of the robo eyes was blinking madly and popped out, one head didn’t work at all. Bill said, “Cut. That was great. Print it. We’re done.”
Well, how can I explain Bob Kurtzman? He handled this situation as though he were Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. He completely freaked out of his fucking gourd, which you don’t get to see all that often, really, and certainly not from the FX crew. But this Cerberus was really cool effect if it was working right. Anyway, Bill let Bob scream and yell, but it was wrap and everybody left.
Well, the powers that be saw the footage, which was unusable, and blew their minds. So, me and the 2nd unit crew spent 3-4 days shooting the hell out of that dog, waiting for each part of it to work right, which eventually it always did, and getting terrific footage. And it was cool, because even by then building a full-sized creature was novel.
You may think that I’ve lost my point, or had no point, but I do. Once everyone saw all of this footage, some bright person asked, “How does the dog get the spear in all three mouths? One minute he’s fending it off with a spear, then suddenly the spear is in the mouths?” And these poor people were stuck. I said, “Reverse motion. We put the spear in all three mouths, then pull it out. If we play it backward, it’ll look like he’s jamming it in.” Bill, the director, tried it, and completely didn’t understand the idea. He finally said, “I can’t do it. It didn’t make sense to me.” So I shot it, and it works fine. Reverse always works.
It's 5:30 AM and the blue gels have arrived.