10/21/22
Newletter134
The Crack of Dawn
At the beginning of my film, Alien Apocalypse (2005), a spaceship lands and four American astronauts come out, two women and two men. One is Bruce Campbell, another is Renee O’Connor, and the other two actors were cast in Bulgaria. I cast an American actor living in Bulgaria named Michael Corey Davis as Captain Chuck Something-or-other. Corey is a tall, handsome, black fellow with his hair in dreads. From the second he sat down in my office and we started to talk, he had the part. I hesitantly asked, “Would you cut off your dreads for the part?” Corey stated flatly, “No.” I thought about it for a second, then said, “In the future astronauts can have dreads.” The part of the captain was only for a few days because the character gets killed early in the story. At lunch Michael was comically bitching, “Of course the black guy gets killed ten minutes into the story.” I said, “I didn’t write it for a black person. No matter what their heritage is, they’re still going to die ten minutes into the movie.” But Corey was on a roll. “Of course it wasn’t written for a black person, the character’s name is Chuck. No black people are named Chuck.” The producer, Bob Perkis, looked up and said, “What about Chuck Berry?”
The fourth astronaut was played by an exceptionally serious Bulgarian actress named Neda Sokolovska. Neda was well-known in Bulgaria as a clown and a mime, which was difficult to believe because she was so damn serious. In one scene she is supposed to freak out and panic, and since Bruce is the mission’s doctor, he punches her in the arm to calm her down. We did one take and Neda said to Bruce, “I couldn’t feel it. Hit me harder.” I glanced at Bruce and could see that she had struck the wrong chord in his head. I said, “Bruce, would you please hit her harder in the next take.” Well, nobody is getting away with insinuating that Bruce isn’t giving it 100%, because he is. Everybody in the cast and crew couldn’t wait to see what happened next. I said action, Neda began to freak out and panic as she was supposed to, then Bruce hauled off slugged her hard. Apparently, that was just what she was hoping for, and she gave a very good performance. I had my take. By the end of the day Neda’s entire shoulder was black and blue.
That same day Neda’s character is shot five times. We were using real explosive squibs (they are now done digitally) and five of them were put on her. Neda, the serious clown, began to cry out of fear as the squibs were being applied, and began saying shit like, “I can’t do this.” I tried to assuage her feelings by saying that I’d had squibs all over me, which I have, and they don’t hurt. Anyway, she cried right up to the moment we filmed. But, being a good actor, she stopped and did the scene, and guess what? The squibs didn’t hurt at all. That was Neda’s last day and I wasn’t sorry to see her go, but she did a good job and she really cared. I’m sure she’s a wonderful clown.
Bulgarian is a particularly difficult language, and similar to Russian. It’s called Cyrillic because it was invented by a Bulgarian monk named Cyril. I don’t know about Russians, but Bulgarians are very proud of their language, and rather proprietary about it. They didn’t seem to like foreigners even attempting to speak it and offered no assistance. If you said something in Bulgarian they would wince, shaking their heads indicating you should immediately stop destroying their beautiful language. Thank you in Bulgarian is Blagodarya. Bruce and I both said this regularly, and we both got stink-eye for even trying. So, being grown adults, we changed it and would say it right to their faces knowing they wouldn’t understand us and would just think we were mangling their language. We would say, “Glob-a-dog-poo,” and that worked every bit as well.
Y’all come back now, hear?
Gobadogpoo!