4/5/23
Newsletter #297
The Crack of Dawn
It was 1983 and I was hitchhiking from Detroit to L.A. to give it my fourth shot. We had already made Evil Dead, but it hadn’t been released yet, and even if it had it wasn’t going to do me the slightest bit of good. On my previous assault I had pushed the hell out of Stryker’s War, for which I had a full-length script and a 45-minute pilot version starring Bruce and Sam, and had gotten nowhere (although it later became Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except [1985]).
I was desperate. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a script, and I hardly had any money. I was 24 years old and if I didn’t get a feature film made soon I’d spontaneously combust.
So, I got stuck at a freeway intersection in Kansas or Nebraska for about twelve hours. It was a terrible place to hitchhike, plus there was hardly any traffic. Finally, I was picked up in a brown van with Massachusetts plates. It was driven by two brothers from Boston with the thickest Boston accents I’d ever heard, and they were going all the way to L.A. There were no windows in the back of the van, and they didn’t want me to do any driving, so I lounged on a mattress reading one of their many Penthouse Magazines.
After many hours of driving we arrived in California. When we got to Barstow in the San Bernardino desert and it was 110 degrees, we saw a gray Datsun 280-Z on the side of the road with two young women standing helplessly beside it. The Boston brothers thoughtfully pulled over to see if we could help. The two women were Latinas who apparently didn’t speak English. We asked, “Need any help?” and they both said, “No comprende” several times. We finally gave up and drove away.
A few minutes later the 280-Z pulled up beside the van. In the front seat were two young Latino men and the girls were in the backseat. The driver reached across the passenger with a pistol and began firing shots into the side of the van. The brothers began yelling, ducked down and floored it. I didn’t know what was going on other than holes were appearing in the van’s side wall (my filmmaker’s mind adds beams of light through the bullet holes, but there weren’t any).
Luckily, this was back in the day of CB radios and the van had one. The brother driving got on the CB and asked, “Any smokies on the line?” Immediately, a voice came back, “You’ve got the Desert Fox, San Bernardino Highway Patrol.” The brother said, “We’ve got a gray, Datsun 280-Z with its lights on firing bullets into the side of our van.” The Desert Fox said, “Right.” Meanwhile, we’re still going 90 mph and the brother driving was ducked down below the dashboard and steering by intuition. Within two minutes the Desert Fox came back on the CB, “We’ve got ‘em. Pull a you-ee and come back.”
We turned around and went back. We found four police cars: two San Bernardino Highway Patrol and two Barstow Police. They had the 280-Z pulled over, the two Latino guys lying on their faces on the sizzling hot road, their hands cuffed behind their backs, and shotguns pressed against their heads. The two girls just stood there watching, looking befuddled.
We all went back to the Barstow police station where we were all questioned separately. When I was finally brought into a little office with a detective in a suit, he asked, “What did you see?” I said, “I didn’t see anything. I was in the back of the van reading Penthouse.” The detective said, “The new one with the girl peeking through the blinds on the cover?” I said, “Yeah, that one.” He said, “There’s some great girl-on-girl action in it. You can go.”
The Boston brothers filled out all of the paperwork and pressed charges for attempted murder.
I arrived in L.A. with absolutely no plan, very little money, and no place to live. I was 24, desperate, and felt that my whole future was somehow at stake.
Stay tuned for the exciting follow-up.
Dawn has not yet arrived here in Barcelona. A man and a woman are yakking loudly in Spanish down on the street eight floors below.
I fully expect to have a really cool day, and I hope you do too.