The Crack of Dawn #790

9/4/2025

9/4/2025

Newsletter #790

The Crack of Dawn

After my first stab at Hollywood in 1977-78, I moved back home to Detroit. My good buddies, Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Scott Spiegel, were all busily making Super-8 movies. Sam and Scott had become a comedy team. They made several comedy films together, starring the two of them, and they were a wacky, funny duo. They both wrote, produced and co-directed these films. Sam’s and Scott’s collaboration culminated in the Super-8 comedy epic, It’s Murder! The film was 85-minutes long—the longest of any of our movies by far—and sadly, nobody liked it but me. I thought it was insanely clever, funny and loaded with clever gags. However, when they showed it no one laughed, and people even walked out. It was considered a disaster. In the year I was gone, Sam had taken over as the director, which I suspect Scott didn’t like. I was the cameraman on a lot of It’s Murder!, and I watched Sam blossom as a director. He kept coming up with one cool shot after another, and I was very impressed. I’m not sure what Scott thought.

Meanwhile, Bruce and I began cranking out 20–30-minute movies, like The Final Round, Acting & Reacting and Holding It, each one more polished than the one before. Scott Spiegel happily acted in them and was always good.

With Stryker’s War under my arm, I went back to L.A. to give it another shot. A year later I came crawling back to Detroit with my tail between my legs, feeling like an utter failure. I moved back into my parents’ house. While I was away, Sam, Bruce and Rob Tapert (formerly Ivan Raimi’s roommate at Michigan State University) had formed a company called Renaissance Pictures to make a feature-length horror film in 16mm called Book of the Dead. They intended to raise $150,000. To achieve this, they made a 25-minute Super-8 pilot version of the feature called Within the Woods. The film didn’t have credits, but Sam directed, and I believe he wrote the script with Scott. Scott played one of the lead roles, conveniently named Scotty. I think that Within the Woods is a great Super-8 movie. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I got back from L.A. right after they finished shooting.

Within the Woods scared the shit out of people, working brilliantly as a pilot. Sam, Bruce and Rob quickly raised enough money to shoot (but not finish) the feature, called Book of the Dead. They asked me if I wanted to work on it and agreed. But Scott was not involved with the film in any way. I don’t know what position they offered him (obviously not partner), but I would think certainly the part of the character still named Scotty. Why had he turned it down? Why didn’t he co-write the script with Sam? Scott, meanwhile, was the only one of us with a full-time job—as the manager of a grocery store—helping to support his mother, sister and niece, so he couldn’t just take off.

In any case, off we went to Tennessee to make Book of the Dead. The six-week shoot turned into a twelve-week shoot. We shot right through New Years, 1979-1980. During these three months of shooting, many of our friends drove down from Michigan to visit the set. But not Scott. I don’t exactly know what happened between Sam and Scott, but I assumed it was in regard to Sam exerting himself as the sole director.

We shot Book of the Dead and returned to Michigan. Scott had begun shooting his own Super-8 horror movie, Night Crew, which was also to be used as a pilot for a feature film. Night Crew starred Sam and John Cameron (who now directs the hit TV series, The Pitt). Of all the Super-8s films, Night Crew was the most violent, which is saying something since both Within the Woods and Stryker’s War were pretty gory. In Night Crew, a stockboy in a grocery store, played by Sam, has his head sawed in half on a bandsaw, his brains coming out into the camera. Scott had snubbed me by not asking me to work on the film, so I didn’t. I wasn’t particularly hurt since Night Crew was being shot in an idiotically haphazard fashion and looked like it was going to be a piece of shit. Not surprisingly, after a few months of on-again, off-again shooting, Night Crew ran out of steam and stopped before it was done. Scott was so angry and frustrated, but he couldn’t go to his best friends, Sam and Bruce, because they were making Book of the Dead. In utter desperation, Scott turned to me for help. I whom he had gone out of his way to snub.

At that point, Scott and I had been friends for ten years. He appeared as an actor in many of my Super-8 films. But we weren’t close friends. Scott was friends with Sam and Bruce. I was friends with Sam and Bruce, so Scott was a friend of my friends. I always thought he was a very funny guy, and he always did a terrific job in all of the acting parts in many of the movies. But he and I had never made a movie together. Scott worked with Sam; and I worked with Bruce. But we all worked with each other.

Night Crew had stalled, and Scott called me. We met for coffee at Howard Johnson’s. We both drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. Scott presented me with his dilemma—he had managed to shoot over half of Night Crew, which he wanted to be about 25 minutes long, just like Within the Woods. At that same time, I was planning to shoot Stryker’s War as a pilot for a feature. Hell, if it worked once, why wouldn’t it work again? So Scott and I were in exactly the same place.

Meanwhile, I considered Scott’s immediate problem and suggested, “What you need is one well-planned weekend shoot. I have a camera, I have lights, I’ll be the cameraman/DP, I’ll set up the camera wherever you tell me to, and you’ll direct the rest of the movie.” Scott thought my idea was perfect, and that’s exactly what we did. We both made sure that everyone would be there, including John Cameron and Sam Raimi. I did some terrific horror lighting, Scott chose many crazy angles (which I pulled off), and Scott finished shooting the movie. It was a good weekend shoot, and everyone had fun. I went my way, Scott went his.

To my surprise, Scott called and asked if I wanted to work with him on the post- production, and I happily agreed. Scott cut the whole movie. Together scored the film with music from other movies, like Herbie Hancock’s score for Death Wish and Denny Zeitlin’s score for the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Scott and I realized we were having a great time working together.

Once Night Crew was finished, we made Stryker’s War. We showed Within the Woods, Stryker’s War and Night Crew at the auditorium of our high school, Wylie E. Groves, charging a buck a ticket. People actually came, including my Yidishe grandmother, and we all had fun. More importantly, all three of these Super-8 movies did their jobs as pilots, and all three generated feature films. All of them had their titles changed: Book of the Dead became Evil Dead; Stryker’s War became Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except; and Night Crew became Intruder.

There’s more.