3/23/23
Newsletter #284
The Crack of Dawn
Before we headed down to Tennessee to make Evil Dead in 1979, I told Sam, Bruce and Rob that since I had a job as a film reviewer for a newspaper in Detroit, incongruously called Magazine, I had to see some movies and review them. Paying no attention – they only had ten thousand other things on their minds – they agreed.
I waited as long as possible into the production, but I had an entire page of the paper to fill, there was a deadline, and I knew they were depending on me. And since this was before email and fax machines, I would have to phone my reviews in. I scoured the Knoxville newspaper, found three new movies playing in theaters that seemed like they weren’t too far from one another (I didn’t know), with showtimes that seemed just possible to make, although I didn’t have a car.
Finally, I told the dynamic trio that I was taking the day off to see these movies I had to review. Sam and Rob both gave me shit for “abandoning” them, but there were still fifteen other people there and they would honestly never miss me. Ivan Raimi (Sam’s brother) was making a run into Knoxville and I got a ride from him. All three theaters were located on the same road, but about a half mile from each other. Honestly, my planning was perfect. I saw Going in Style (1979) with George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg; hiked a half mile, saw Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated, extremely expensive follow-up to Close Encounters, 1941 (1979); then hiked another half mile and saw Disney’s live-action spectacle, The Black Hole (1979), with Maximilian Schell and Ernest Borgnine. That was a full day of movie-going.
It was just getting dark when Ivan picked me up and brought me back to the house where all eighteen of us lived together. Luckily for me, they were all out at the cabin shooting. Unluckily for me, Sam and Ivan’s little brother, Ted, who was about fourteen, had just arrived. I sat down at an ancient typewriter and began writing my reviews. Ted decided that with nothing better to do he was just going to bother me as much as he could, which was a lot. Somehow I managed to write reviews, phone them into the paper, and made the deadline. With that accomplished, Ted and I went to the set.
Sam, being the twenty-year-old idiot savant that he was back then, was shooting a 2nd unit shot – with his 1st unit standing there and watching – of a little bomb exploding on a tree branch, then crewmembers pulling the branch down with fishing line. A lightning bolt would be put in later. I came wandering up, and Sam being Sam, stopped production to confront me. “You saw Steven Spielberg’s new movie, 1941, before me?” I said, “I did.” He asked, “How was it?” I said, “Brilliant. It’s a masterpiece. It’s his best movie yet.” Sam stuck his face right into mine and asked, “Really?” I said, “Really.” Sam turned to the cast and crew and announced that everybody was getting the day off tomorrow so we could all go see Spielberg’s new masterpiece.
We, the cast and crew of Evil Dead, drove into Knoxville and saw 1941. When we came out Sam stomped over and confronted me. “You asshole. You said it was a masterpiece.” I said, “What’s the matter? Didn’t you like it?” Sam said, “Fuck you,” and walked away shaking his head. Bruce and Rob were amused, as was I, of course.
Meanwhile, twenty-six years later in 2006, I was shooting Stan Lee’s Harpies in Bulgaria. I had a scene on top of castle parapet. The art department at UFO Studios in Sofia built a good-looking fake stone parapet in the studio. Me and the white-bearded, long white-haired, DP, Ivo (who was younger than me), looked up at the parapet for the first time. It was fifteen feet tall and the stage ceiling was twenty feet, leaving us five feet to shoot the scene. Ivo blew a gasket, right before I did, which is good because the tirade was then in Bulgarian, which they might possibly understand.
Carpenters arrived with chainsaws and proceeded to cut five feet off the bottom of the parapet, which was an ordeal. Me and the 1st AD, Tony, an old, bald man with thick glasses (who was also younger than me), looked at each other in despair. Our schedule was going down the shit hole before our eyes.
We finally got on top of the parapet where the scene would be shot. It was about ten feet around and there was a trap door built into the floor leading to a flight of wooden stairs. And who should come walking up those steps but the star of our movie, Steven Baldwin, in costume, in a good mood, and early. This was a new one. I showed Steven the blocking of him fighting off harpies that would be put in later in post. As I was walking around the top of the parapet explaining, with Steven following me, suddenly he disappeared from view, like the ground had dropped out from beneath him. What on earth?
Steven had blindly stepped into the hole with trap door and fallen ten feet. I looked down and he was face first on the stage floor, having also fallen down the stairs. He looked dead. Like any good film director, as opposed to a good person, I thought, “Well, there goes the movie.”
But Steven had grit in him. I helped him to his feet. His costume was torn and he was bleeding from one of his knees and one of his elbows, and for a minute he had no idea where he was. But he came around once first aid was applied and a new costume was procured. And we shot the silly scene.
That image of Steven just dropping out of my view is indelibly burned into my memory forever.
Good on ya.