11/18/23
Newsletter #514
The Crack of Dawn
Returning to the “lost” period of 1980-1983, between the shooting Evil Dead, and when it was finally released, which was anything but lost for me. Going from 22 years old to 25 years old was the finale of my life’s Act I.
Amidst all of those comedy short films we were making, I was planning a feature film. Since Sam, Bruce and Rob had made a short, Super-8, horror film called Within the Woods (1979) as a sales tool to raise the money for Evil Dead, I decided to follow suit. I took my 185-page script, Bloodbath, that I had written with Sheldon Lettich in L.A., about the marines versus the Manson family, and condensed it into a 25-page script that I could shoot in Super-8, entitled, Stryker’s War. I recently asked Sheldon about it, and he no longer remembers it at all (he is 72), but when Sheldon read Stryker’s War, he completely blew a gasket. I was working as a night security guard at a construction site and was using the phone in the construction trailer, which thankfully had a long enough cord so I could stand outside and smoke. Sheldon was so fucking horrified that he yelled at me for a half hour straight as loud at what I’d done to our 4-pound masterpiece of a screenplay, Bloodbath. He felt that I had turned it into such a piece of shit that he wanted his name removed. I said, “Sure,” but I ignored him and kept his name on as co-story because he helped work out the story, and he’d added a number of believable details – he did serve in Vietnam in the Marine Corps after all. But he wanted to make a serious movie, like Coming Home, and I wanted to make Rolling Thunder.
My approach to the massive Stryker’s War rewrite – I edited out 160-pages, and totally rewrote the remaining 25-pages – was conceived by myself and Bruce Campbell while we were driving a Ryder truck full of equipment home from shooting in Evil Dead in Tennessee. I said to Bruce, “Bloodbath is too serious for its own good. I want to make a John Wayne movie.” Bruce knew exactly what I was talking about. In the course of perhaps four hours, we completely reworked the entire story. As soon as we were finished reconstructing the story, Bruce fell into a deep sleep. I stopped the truck at a diner and wrote a detailed outline on the back of three placemats. That is exactly the story of the movie, including several lines of dialogue, and that’s why Bruce gets a co-story credit.
So, Stryker’s War was shot in eight consecutive days, which was the longest shoot for one of my movies in my life. And it remains one of the best shoots, 45 years later. Bruce and I produced it, and the production went splendidly. It was a gorgeous summer that year and I caught some brilliant blue skies. It ended up being 45-minutes long, and it was pretty darn good, if I do say so myself.
When Sam finished Within the Woods, he had Bruce and Rob to aid and abet him in raising the money for a feature. I, on the other hand, had no one. We all, meaning Sam, Bruce, Rob and I were all together in our very first office in the Pioneer Building, which was located directly across the hall from Romig the Magician (who would soon retire). The office had previously been a dentist’s office and was broken up into a half-dozen little cubicles, plus there was a front room. Each of us had our own tiny office. I had one cubicle which was separate from Renaissance Pictures called Action Pictures. From this tiny office, with one phone, was where Torro, Torro, Torro! and Cleveland Smith, Bounty Hunter were made. Both of which I made with Scott Spiegel.
To this day I don’t fully understand how Scott somehow managed to be neither a part of Renaissance Pictures nor Action Pictures for several years. Although he and Sam were best buds, and they had collaborated on several Super-8 films together — something happened; I don’t know what — and Scott didn’t come to Tennessee while we were shooting Evil Dead, nor did he work on the script, which he would eventually do on Evil Dead 2. And meanwhile, Scott had his own short Super-8 pilot film intended as a sales tool for a feature film that he was shooting in fits and starts called Night Crew (and as Within the Woods became Evil Dead, and Stryker’s War became Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except, Night Crew became Intruder [1989]).
Since I’m forcing my present-day brain to put things in their chronological order back then, it’s causing me to see dynamics that I hadn’t previously considered. I was in L.A. in for most of 1979, returning to Michigan in September, ready to go work on Evil Dead, except that production got pushed back to November. I don’t know when Night Crew started shooting, and Sam is in the film (he gets his head sawn in half by a bandsaw, which is truly gruesome). When we returned from Tennessee I shot and lit some of Night Crew and helped Scott edit the film.
So, anyway, there I was in my little, tiny Action Pictures cubicle, ostensibly raising money for a feature version of Stryker’s War, not knowing what the fuck I was doing, but I was really making short comedy films with Scott. And Cleveland Smith had turned out better than the two films before it. It actually exceeded our meager hopes.
I’ll make a slight turn in the narrative for second. Since Scott and I had used 16mm for both Torro and Cleveland Smith, and had paid for the stock music, we were able to make the first sales of the rights for our films of any of us. We sold (leased) the rights to show both short films on the U.S. Military Cable Service, as well as one of the very first cable television providers, ON TV.
Our story has just entered 1982 in this “lost” era, before Evil Dead’s release. Exciting new innovations were arriving on the scene, like VHS tape and recorders (we’d previously been using ¾” U-Matic tapes), and the previously mentioned, cable TV.
Now this story takes another turn, which I’ll save for the next installment in, The Lost Era of “Evil Dead,” or A Really Fantastic, Fertile Period in My Life.
Good day.
Hello Sheldon, I wasn't talking about intruder, I was talking about night crew, which was indeed shot in Detroit. I had nothing to do with intruder, nor have I even seen it
What you omitted (or forgot) from your recollection about "Night Crew/Intruder" was Lawrence Bender's involvement. If you look it up on IMDB you'll see he's credited as a producer. And the movie was not shot in Michigan, but in Los Angeles. I know this because I visited the set a couple of times while they were shooting, in some nondescript suburb near Downtown L. A. Sam Raimi was there too, playing the store's butcher. Lawrence's girlfriend at the time, Liz Cox, was the female lead. (TRIVIA: Liz later dated Oliver Stone for a short while). I'm the one who hooked up Scotty with Quentin, then hooked up Scotty with Lawrence, which begat Lawrence and Quentin becoming a powerhouse team, which led to a couple of Oscar-winning movies. Even further down the road, of course, Quentin loosely used "Thou Shalt Not Kill Except..." as the basis for his best and most successful movie ever, which is "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood." Which is also my favorite Tarantino movie, and yours too, as I recall.