The Crack of Dawn

Volume #209

1/4/23

Newsletter #209

The Crack of Dawn

1988 was kind of a lost, hustling, mostly non-production year.  In retrospect, the highlight of that year was certainly the Detroit Pistons (Bad Boys) playing the L.A. Lakers (who had both Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar) for the championship and losing in the last ten seconds.  I was writing Lunatics: A Love Story; Sam Raimi was writing Darkman (possibly the only screenplay ever written by three sets of brothers: Sam and Ivan Raimi, Joel and Ethan Coen [uncredited], and the Goldin brothers); and Joel and Ethan Coen were writing Miller’s Crossing, and trying to resurrect an old script, The Hudsucker Proxy.

So, Rob, the producer, decided to use this down-time wisely and fulfill one of his own dreams – to make a deep-sea fishing documentary.  Rob would produce, write and be the host.  He hired me to direct, photograph and edit.  We shipped out of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on a 60-foot boat heading 350 miles south to the Revillagigedo Islands, site of the world-record Yellowfin tuna catches.  I think the biggest tuna caught there was over 300-pounds, possibly nearly 400-pounds.

Once the boat left sight of the shore, me and everyone else, except the boat’s crew and Rob, were dreadfully seasick for the next nine days.  I still can’t go out on a boat without getting sick.  Up until then I had never had a problem and had been out on boats many, many times.  But being on a tiny ship on a giant ocean, constantly at the mercy of the mercurial weather, made me forever seasick.  Nevertheless, I still had a movie to shoot.

Rob had chosen the long-forgotten video format of S-VHS, an early high-resolution system that worked pretty darn well, with bright, vivid colors, and held up when it was transferred to the severely old-fashioned format of ¾-inch video for editing.  This was the film that I was editing at Sam’s crazy rental house on stilts in Silver Lake, which he was subletting to Joel and Ethan, and their girlfriends, Holly Hunter and Fran McDormand.  Raising Arizona had come out the year before and the Coen bros. were just starting to get hot.  Those folks, having recently arrived in Hollywood with a well-received movie, wanted to party, all the time.  All I wanted to do was to cut this fucking fishing video, on their dining room table.  With a big, ugly, noisy editing system. This actually lasted for about a month before I disgustedly moved back to Detroit and cut the video there.

Meanwhile, back at the Revillagigedo Islands.  Our host, Rob, who did a very good job explaining the intricacies of deep-sea fishing, of which there are many, could not say the word “Revillagigedo” under any circumstances.  It’s pronounced: ree-vaya hee-hay-dough.  I don’t know how many times I recorded Rob speaking the narration for the film – it’s 60-minutes long and there’s a lot of narration – but he never said the word correctly.  We both knew that eventually he just had to say it right – this was a goddamn documentary after all – but every time he screwed it up, it got funnier, which only made it harder to get it right.  I had everything in place to finish the film, except Rob saying Revillagigedo correctly.  I began coming over to his house every evening, setting up a microphone in the bathroom, which had the best sound, then, when he summoned the wherewithal, Rob would come in and try it yet again.  I cannot express how funny it was waiting for the dreaded word.  When he finally got it right, it was spooky. We both looked around silently, awaiting a giant foot to crush us.

I’m proud to say that 35-years later, the full-length documentary, Battle the Big Tuna (1988), remains in video release from Bennett Marine Video.  I know this because my nephew just bought a copy.

However, from the time of its original release on VHS, and remaining still on the DVD box, it reads, Battle of the Big Tuna, which puts me in mind of two big tunas squaring off and fighting each other. “What did you call my mother, you punk? I’ll smack you upside of your gills!”

I ask you, how can this be anything else but a terrific day, we made it here, didn’t we?