10/13/22
Newsletter126
The Crack of Dawn
One day in junior high shop class, Sam Raimi took a steel pipe about two-inches wide and fourteen inches long, heated up one end with a torch and pounded it flat. I was at the drill press and he handed me the pipe and asked that I drill a hole about six inches from the flattened end – this would be for the fuse. Sam had decided to make a pipe bomb – really a cannon – and now I was happily helping him. I said that for it to work right we needed to seal the flattened end, so I welded it shut. Word quickly spread. When Sam and I got off the bus we had at least ten other kids following us to see how this would work out. Sam and I, along with this whole pack of kids, went into the Raimi’s basement where Sam stored his ordinance – literally hundreds of fire crackers. Sam and I sliced open a couple dozen fire crackers and dumped out the gunpowder until we had a pretty big pile. We then poured the gunpowder into the steel pipe up to the drilled hole. Sam had a spool of thick, underwater fuse. We shoved in about a foot of fuse, then continued adding gunpowder until half the pipe was full. Then we shoved in cotton and smashed it down with a stick, creating pressure. Holding our pipe cannon, me and Sam and the pack of kids went to the empty wooded lot across the street from my house. We filled the pipe with gravel, shoved the flattened end into the dirt so it was aiming upward at an angle, then none of us had the guts to light the fuse. Finally, Sam lit it. We all backed up a couple of hundred yards and waited. The underwater fuse burned very slowly. As we all hesitantly crept back toward the empty lot, believing that the fuse had gone out, it blew. The explosion was insanely loud. Gravel blasted through the treetops tearing off substantial tree limbs that all came crashing to the ground. A moment later burning cotton came floating down from the sky, then a moment after that the steel pipe fell out of the sky and clanged to the pavement. The welded end was blown to shreds. Had that come down on anyone’s head it most certainly would have killed them, or fucked them up bad. There’s no ironic payoff to this story, but I guess the moral is: it’s amazing what you can achieve with teamwork.
The first day on the set of Hercules and the Amazon Women (1994) . . . no, I have to back up. In 1993 Hercules was given the greenlight from Universal to make five pilot TV movies, that might or might not engender a series. I was hired to write the first script, and this was my first and only experience writing for a studio committee of perhaps twelve executives. I would sit at the end of a long conference table and the young executives did nothing but tear my script to pieces line by line, asking questions like, “Why would Zeus, king of the gods, impregnate a mortal woman?” I said, “Because that’s what happened in the myth.” Someone else would chime in, “Yeah, I don’t think he would do that.” I said, “If he doesn’t, there’s no Hercules.” They all agreed that it was stupid for Zeus to do such a thing, and maybe there was a better way. Maybe Zeus and the mortal woman could meet cute of something. I put up with that shit for about two months, then quit. Hunks of that script got used in several other episodes. I was then hired as the 2nd unit director. So, on the first day of the first film, I arrived on set and there was the most stunning woman I’d ever seen in my life. She was the actress playing the 2nd lead Amazon woman – the lead was Roma Downey – and her name was Lucy Lawless. She was 25 years old, blonde, beautiful and wearing a sexy, black leather warrior outfit. I felt like Michael Corleone when he first sees Apolonia and is hit with the “thunderbolt.” I subsequently dogged Lucy’s heels for the next two days, trying to be witty and saying, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.” After perhaps the tenth time, Lucy said very calmly and intelligently, “I believe that you’re making a reference to an American television show starring Lucille Ball, is that correct?” Grinning like an idiot, I nodded. She continued, “Yes, we never got that show here in New Zealand.” I was undaunted. I continued to follow her around the set – I’ve never done such a thing before or since – using up whatever wit I might have had. Finally, on the third day, Lucy brought this fellow to the set with her. She literally took him by the shoulders, placed him between me and her, and said, “Josh, I’d like you to meet my husband, Garth Lawless.” I’d managed to bug Lucy so bad that she had to bring her husband to the set. Anyway, that finally cooled my ardor.
Buenos días, amigos.