12/28/22
Newsletter #202
The Crack of Dawn
When I first met my buddy Sheldon at the end of 1977, I was 18 and he was 26. I had made several Super-8 movies and had fumbled my way through one feature-length script. Sheldon had served a year in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, had gone to L.A. Trade Tech College on the GI Bill to learn photography, had become an architectural photographer, was attending the American Film Institute, and was fumbling his way through his first full-length screenplay. We were both burning to get into the film business. I came up with a story idea, the Marines vs. the Manson family, and pitched it to Sheldon. He laughed, declared that it was ridiculous, and kiddingly said, “It should be called Bloodbath.” The next day Sheldon called me, said that it wasn’t a ridiculous idea, it was a good idea, and we should write it, which we did. However, Sheldon with his actual Vietnam experience, felt that the script should be very realistic, which wasn’t what I was seeing. We ended up with a 185-page script, which is 65-pages longer than your average feature script.
In 1979 me, Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and a gang of us went to Tennessee and made Evil Dead. After we wrapped, Bruce and I drove a Ryder truck full of props and equipment back to Detroit. I said, “I want to rewrite Bloodbath. Presently, it’s too realistic and grim. I want it to be like a ridiculously violent John Wayne movie.” Well, Bruce and I are both John Wayne fans, and we immediately understood how to completely transform the story, which we then did, act by act, all the way through the story to the conclusion. It was slightly miraculous. It’s like we weren’t making it up, but we were both describing a movie we’d already seen. Upon completion, Bruce fell dead asleep, and I pulled the truck into a diner. I then wrote the complete outline for the script on the back of three placemats (which I still have).
Since Bruce, Sam and Rob Tapert had just made a Super-8 “pilot” film that they used to raise the money for Evil Dead, I decided to do the same thing and shoot a pilot of Bloodbath. Working as a night security guard at a construction site, I took Sheldon’s and my behemoth screenplay, and Bruce’s and my three placemats, combined them together and came up with a 20-page script called, Stryker’s War, designed to be shot in Super-8 for almost no money. When it was done, I thought I’d done a pretty good job. I sent the script to Sheldon.
I remember this like it was yesterday, although it was 40 years ago. I was in the construction trailer, which was my office, all night long, and Sheldon had to call me because I couldn’t make long-distance calls on the company phone. Sheldon called, then gave me his true, sincere reaction to my little script – he hated it so much, with such vehemence, that they had not yet conceived the words in the English language to describe his intense, overwhelming disgust. I had fucked it up so bad that I had somehow managed to not get a single comma or period correct. I stood there in the trailer in my idiotic security guard outfit, unable to get a word in edgewise, and listened to this for a half an hour – but at least Sheldon was paying for the call.
He finally took a breath and asked, “So, what are you going to do?” I said, “Shoot it.” Sheldon said, “You’re not going to change it?” I said, “I already did. You and I mapped out the plot. Bruce and I completely changed the approach. It’s exactly what I want.” Sheldon said in a huff, “Fine. Do whatever you want.”
So, Bruce and I put together and shot Stryker’s War (1981), which was the Ben Hur of Super-8 movies. It was a 40-minute extravaganza, with battle scenes, uniforms, weapons, squibs, and set in 1969, with period cars. Bruce played Sgt. Stryker, with a streak of gray through his hair – we were 23 – and Sam played Manson. We shot the film in eight contiguous days during a warm, sunny, gorgeous summer here in Michigan.
Last week I took a long walk with Mr. Bruce Campbell from one end of San Francisco to the other. We began at the Dragon Gate entrance, crossed Chinatown, went up Telegraph Hill, then came down across the whole city to the Embarcadero, past the American Zoetrope building. I brought up to Bruce the final day of shooting on Stryker’s War, which consisted of me, Bruce, Sam and Tim Philo (who shot Evil Dead) in the woods on a sunny warm day shooting the big running chase between Stryker and Manson, then their grand finale fight scene.
This bright, sunny, Kodachrome day stays with me somehow as a perfect day in my life. We all laughed, we shot movies, we had fun, we had a blast.
Let’s all have a good day, shall we.