11/30/22
Newletter174
The Crack of Dawn
When I first moved to Hollywood in 1976, I became friends with a fellow named Marvis. He was a bulky, short, muscular guy with long straight black hair down to the middle of his back. Marvis worked as a carpenter on movie sets. He lived in a big old shabby house, built in 1919 which is old for Hollywood, with five of his friends from Cleveland. The house was on Lanewood St., about six houses from Hollywood High School, and around the corner from the Chinese Theater. Marvis’s buddy Linda who lived there worked as a laborer on movie construction crews. His other buddy supervised backgrounds for various animation companies. Then there were two brothers who dealt weed. There was a party going on at the Lanewood house every night, and I hung out there.
When I first met Marvis, he was working on one of the worst, most expensive movies Hollywood had ever bumbled their way into, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), starring George Burns, Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, Earth, Wind & Fire, Steve Martin, Aerosmith and Alice Cooper. When The Bee Gees get into a fight with Aerosmith and they begin slapping each other like little girls, I thought, “Movies can’t get worse than this. It’s not possible.” I picked Marvis up from work, which was located in a big empty lot across the street from MGM. They had built an entire town, Heartland, which you see in the movie for a couple of minutes as George Burns wanders around puffing on a cigar attempting to explain what the hell is going on in this cockamamie movie. As Marvis got in the car I asked, “How much did that set cost?” He shrugged his burly shoulders, “I don’t know with labor, but it’s a million dollars’ worth of lumber. And the second they’re done with it, bulldozers will roll in, put it into dumpsters, and throw it out.”
Marvis’s pal Linda worked on Francis Coppola’s disaster, One from the Heart (1982). Francis had returned from the Philippines and making Apocalypse Now (1979) with an enormous, crazy cocaine habit – this was the cocaine/disco era – and bought his own studio, American Zoetrope. He then proceeded to make a series of expensive shitty movies – One from the Heart, Rumble Fish (1983), Hammett (1982, with Wim Wenders directing), and other movies – while remaining ensconced in a silver Airstream trailer known as the Silverfish and snorting cocaine. His son was dealing cocaine to the crew. Linda worked on all of those movies. Marvis built sets for the first five Star Trek movies. Paramount Pictures was not smart enough to keep the bridge set intact. Marvis, who became a construction coordinator, and his guys rebuilt the Enterprise bridge set five times.
I recall Marvis working on The Fifth Element (1997) forever; like a year. As I understand it, a European consortium put together $150 million to make a whole slate of European produced/ directed Hollywood movies. Director Luc Besson (whose work I like, but not that film) spent all the money on the one movie, and it tanked. So much for the European consortium, which sounded like a good idea to me.
Marvis worked with a fellow named Dave Brenner. Dave’s dad, Albert Brenner, was one of the biggest art directors in Hollywood, having done The Hustler, Fail Safe, The Sunshine Boys, Pretty Woman, etc. So, Albert art directed Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), and hired his son Dave, who hired Marvis, to build the sets. This was a ridiculously expensive movie, and it took place on a train. They shot it on the Warners lot – I came by a couple of times to check it out – in two soundstages where they had knocked out the wall between them and installed the longest green screen in history. They had about eight or nine full-sized train cars in front of it. When anybody came onto the stage, they immediately got sick to their stomach, including me. Too much green screen is sickening.
So of course, I wandered away and inspected the Warner Brothers lot. They had the Hoola-hoop-sized wax album that is the soundtrack for The Jazz Singer (1927) in a case mounted on a wall. At least they did back in 1995.
A good day to one and all.