9/12/22
Newsletter95
The Crack of Dawn
Dino De Laurentiis was a great character: a short, intense, loud-mouthed Italian man. He produced over 500 movies, and won an Oscar in 1954 for Federico Fellini’s La Strada (starring my good buddy, Anthony Quinn). Dino married Silvano Mangano, the beautiful star of one of his early films, Bitter Rice (1948). In the small world department, my Hungarian grandmother had a good friend named Francois who lived in Paris and her best friend was Silvano Mangano. In fact, I will digress.
On the last day of shooting my Hercules film, Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur (1994), I had Anthony Quinn sign a poster of his film, Barabbas (1961), produced by Dino De Laurentiis. The poster has four pictures of Quinn on it, and says, “Powerful in Lawrence of Arabia, Explosive in The Guns of Navarone, memorable in Zorba the Greek,” then, “ A great artist in his greatest role, Barabbas, then there’s a picture of Quinn kissing a woman. A gal on the crew asked him, “Who is the woman?” Quinn said, “That is a very young Sophia Loren.” Me being me, I said, “No, it’s Silvano Mangano.” Quinn seemed surprised, “Oh, yeah, it was Silvano.” I handed Mr. Quinn a sharpie. Please keep in mind that we had been shooting together for two weeks. He looked at me, clearly had no idea what my name was, and wrote, “Fond regards, Out of so many – but these I loved – Anthony Quinn.”
Dino had a palatially-sized desk raised up on a platform. Apparently, the first time Dino met Arnold Schwartzenegger, very early in his career, Arnold looked at the desk in awe and said, “Why would such a little man have such a big desk?” Dino went nuts and hollered, “You fucking Nazi! We never make pictures together!” And then they made Conan the Barbarian (1982).
So Dino produced Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. [Interestingly, Evil Dead 2 (1986) shot at the same time as Blue Velvet (1986) in North Carolina].
Now, why was at this screening? I don’t know. But at Dino’s building in Beverly Hills, in a small screening room, there were five of us watching a very early cut of Army of Darkness that had to be 30 minutes longer than the finished film (which is a short 81 minutes). I was seated in the front row, then directly behind me was Sam, Bruce, Rob Tapert and Dino De Laurentiis. Well, I’m not really a fan of that film to begin with, but all of the extra footage was of skeletons battling skeletons, that was all thankfully removed. Uh-oh, another digression.
Bruce asked me to add voices on film’s the temporary soundtrack. So the army of skeletons are hauling a big tree on a wagon. I’m one of the grunting skeletons, and Bruce was the skeleton commander yelling, “Move your bony asses!”
So I’m sitting there in the screening room, with Dino right behind me, and it would have been highly improper for me to squirm. But the skeletons just wouldn’t stop fighting each other, my ass was on fire, and every fiber in my body wanted to squirm. I don’t think I’ve ever sat so still for a movie in my entire life.
The sun’s up and it’s a brand new day.