5/14/23
Newsletter #336
The Crack of Dawn
Half a century ago, in 1972, in 9th grade study hall, Bruce Campbell sat behind me. He and I weren’t friends yet. His locker was right near mine – they were alphabetical, Becker, Campbell – he and I were in an extracurricular drama class together; we had been in a play together, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; and Bruce had already appeared in my Super-8 movie, Oedipus Rex; but we didn’t hang out. I was a hippie and hung out with the stoners; Bruce was a nerd with black horn-rimmed glasses and suspenders, and I don’t know who he hung out with – other nerds, I suppose.
So, one day in study hall, Bruce tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’m in The King & I.” I said, “Cool, do you play the king?” Bruce said, “No, I play the king’s son.” I sighed, shook my head in disappointment, and said, “You need to have more ambition, Bruce. You should go out for the king.” He looked at me with a deadpan expression, then went back to his homework. I shrugged, thinking, “Kids these days. There so fucking lazy.”
When I got home from school, I was sitting at the kitchen table perusing the various magazines and newspapers to which we were subscribed – Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Bazaar, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Barron’s, my TV Guide (the rest of the family used the one that came with the newspaper), the Detroit Free Press, and the Birmingham Eccentric, our local newspaper. As I leafed through the Eccentric, I came upon a 2-page spread of the St. Dunstin’s Players’ production of The King & I. Of the many local theater groups around town, St. Dunstin’s was the best, being part of the Cranbrook School, which is a famously good school. There was a big photograph of the whole cast attired in terrific costumes, and there was 14-year-old Bruce wearing a turban, no shirt, with his arms crossed.
I was aghast. I had just advised him to have more ambition, and here he was in this big, real production. I thought he was talking about a school play, where it was actually possible for him to play the king. This was like one step from Broadway. I felt like a complete asshole.
The next day in study hall I said, “I saw the article in the paper.” Bruce nodded, “Yeah, it was a good article.” He didn’t give a shit about my stupid advice from the day before, however, 50 years later, I still feel like an idiot.
I didn’t see Bruce’s show (although I did see him in several other plays later on), but at just about that same time I did see one of the many revivals of The King & I with Yul Brynner. Yul Brynner was an astounding character; a poseur as Anthony Quinn told me. His performance of the king on stage was truly the biggest performance I’ve ever seen. Yul grew into that part, because he was way too young to play an old king when he first did it on stage, then made the movie in 1956 — he was 36. When I saw him do it he was about 52. He got about 26 standing ovations, then he took pity on us and our sore, aching hands and didn’t come back out.
Meanwhile, I avidly followed Ted Raimi’s stage career, and saw him in all three of his high school plays. Ted was a gigantic ham and stole every scene he was in. The highlight was Ted playing the Wizard in The Wiz, in an all-white production. Personally, I felt that it was an inappropriate choice. Nevertheless, it’s a peppy musical with good songs – Ease on Down the Road – and the Wizard doesn’t enter until a third of the way into the show. Ted played the Wizard as James T. Kirk, and Ted at 15 had Kirk down pat. It was one of the funniest things that I’ve ever seen. Ted would walk deliberately all the way downstage to the audience, then turn abruptly, point and say perfectly as William Shatner, “And what about you, lion!”
Community theater was very popular back then. My mother had been part of Willow Way when I was little, that was located way out in Bloomfield, not far from where I live right now. The theater company was run by a bold, brassy woman named Celia Turner, who often took parts in the plays, and was a good actress with a professional attitude, and therefore, she was worth listening to. I joined Willow Way when I was 14. When I was 15, I played one of the Jets – A-rab – in West Side Story. It had well-choregraphed musical numbers, of which I was a part, and we did ten performances around town, at a couple of different high schools.
During those ten performances, in Doc’s drugstore, as the Jets wait around, I was given the direction to play solitaire. Easy enough. Except that for seven performances in a row, I didn’t actually play solitaire, I pretended to play solitaire as I waited for my cue, so that I could say something like, “Right, Daddy-O.” But during the eighth performance I had my one and only brush with me method acting. Without trying very hard, I had gotten to a point of familiarity with my few lines, and the many dance moves, to where in that performance, I was A-rab. When it got to the scene in Doc’s when I’m play solitaire, I really played solitaire. I didn’t fake it, and I still got my cue, and said my line very naturally, like A-rab would, and it was working. “Hey,” I thought, “this acting thing is OK, when it works and you do it right, that is.” As we came offstage after the scene, Celia Turner, the director, said to me out of 25 actors, “Josh, no one can hear you, speak up.”
My career as an actor ended right there. Apparently, if I did right, I did wrong. Being the director seemed like a much better idea.
Yep, the sky is blue, and the day is beginning.
It’s kind of exciting in its own way.
The slogan of my movie, Morning, Noon & Night (2018), is, “Every day is a miniature eternity.”