9/26/22
Newsletter109
The Crack of Dawn
Bruce Campbell taught a filmmaking class for teens somewhere in the 1980s. At the end there was a film festival and competition between several different film classes in the area. Bruce asked me to sub for him once, and I was clueless as to what I’d do, but Bruce had done such a good job that all the students already knew what they were doing and I didn’t have to do anything. For the final festival Bruce asked a few of his pals to come in as judges, which I did. One of the students, Jenny, had put her heart and soul into her 15-minute film, and had done a pretty good job. However, the day before the festival, poor Jenny pushed the wrong button and deleted her entire soundtrack including all of the dialogue. Having done this myself I can attest to it being an awful experience. You’re sure you’ve ruined the whole movie, but you haven’t. So, Bruce helped Jenny replace all of the dialogue in the film the day and night before. I don’t remember her story, but there was a girl, played by her, who encounters about a half dozen men at a bus station. Bruce got Jenny to replace her own lines, which worked fine. Then Bruce replaced the voices of every other character. Bruce is a terrific mimic, so each male character received one of his impersonations: Sean Connery, Elvis Presley, Cary Grant, John Wayne, etc. It was an all-star cast. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. All of us judges were falling out of our chairs we were laughing so hard. And Jenny won 1st place. Bruce singlehandedly turned Jenny’s disaster into triumph.
Speaking of dialogue replacement, or looping, on Sam Raimi’s second feature, Crimewave (1985; Joel and Ethan Coen’s first film credit as co-writers), Sam asked me to come in and do voices for the background soundtrack. This entailed putting in grunts and groans for various characters just to fill it out. I was doing some guy who had to gasp as a phone pole came down on a car, and I did it all right, but Sam said to go again. All right. And God only knows what bug he had up his ass that day because he made me do this gasp about twenty times. Dissatisfied with all of my performances, Sam kicked me out of the sound facility. I found this a tad harsh considering that I had gotten up early, driven to Detroit, and waited hours for my turn, all for free. Soon thereafter, Sam co-starred in my first feature, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except (1985), and guess what? We had to replace about twenty of his lines. For the sake of the quality of the film – not revenge – I made Sam do every one of those twenty lines twenty times each. I put him through hell. I’d say, “The sync is close, but not quite right. Please try it again.” As they say, what goes around, comes around.
Guttentag.