11/21/23
Newsletter #516
The Crack of Dawn
1982 became 1983. Evil Dead finally did get theatrically released and didn’t do very well, but many people took notice of Sam’s direction. Plus, it had caught on in England. It played at one theater, the Palace Theater, for many months. Boy George admitted later that he sneaked into the Palace to see Evil Dead several times. Then Evil Dead became part of a British trial for pornography and overly graphic, gory horror movies. Sam flew to England to testify, but he was never called to the stand. In any case, that’s when Sam became famous.
1983 became 1984. Back in Ferndale, Michigan, me and Scott were in our office feeling utterly dejected. We had raised $20,000 in fourteen months, and now we only had another $730,000 to go. Mathematically, it didn’t add up – we’d be 110 when we had enough money. Nor did it help Scott or I that Sam, Bruce and Rob were suddenly jetting around the world, going to the Cannes Film Festival, and quickly putting together a $4 million film, Crimewave (aka, The XYZ Murders), that Sam co-wrote with Joel and Ethan Coen (but not Scott). Joel was the assistant editor on Evil Dead.
I said to Scott, “At this rate we’ll never raise the money for Cleveland Smith. We can’t afford this office. I’m going back to Hollywood.” Scott said, “Wait, we’ve got $20,000 and we’re not giving it back.” Good point. He asked, “How much did Stryker’s War cost?” I said, “$5,000.” Scott said, “We have four times that much, let’s make Stryker’s War a feature.” I said in exasperation, “That’s what I wanted to do for the past three years and nobody else wanted to.” Scott said, “Now’s the time.” I think it was April. Scott said, “When should we shoot?” I immediately said, “My birthday, August 17. The height of summer.”
And God damn it if we didn’t put that movie together in something like 15 weeks. It has a cast of over a hundred, and it’s a 1969 period piece, of which we really tried to be accurate. For a severely low-budget movie, every car and every prop is correct for the period.
Only here’s the thing. The Big Thing. Between Evil Dead and Crimewave, Bruce had joined the Screen Actors Guild. Our feature version of Stryker’s War had to be non-SAG or we couldn’t afford to make it. Therefore, we couldn’t use Bruce, and Bruce wanted the part. It’s a shame, but I don’t regret it because it wasn’t my decision. Still, we really lost our ace in the hole. Had Bruce starred in the film it would have done much better.
Oh, well. The first thing that Scott and I did was to rewrite the script. It was presently a 25-page script that had miraculously become a 45-minute movie. That was because so much of the movie was action, without dialogue.
Now we added more violence to Act III, plus a back story with Sally – including a flashback to the mid-1960s – as well as a complicated introduction battle scene in Vietnam, plus a character introduction scene in a bunker – which meant building a set. And we added more with the Manson family. We added the Manson family invading a house, killing the occupants, and ostensibly terrorizing a baby. We included the crazy Manson girls who hitch a ride from the marines. Scott’s and my version came out to 75-pages, which we felt pretty good about.
The fact that I find my script covers posted online is kind of amusing to me. That’s what the script looked like that we used to shoot the film. It had that business report, curly black plastic binding. The photo is of a real recon team in Vietnam. The marines in our movie never looked that good.
In any case, then we made the movie, which was run out of the Ferndale offices. In this lost era between shooting and releasing Evil Dead, we were moviemaking motherfuckers, and I’m not even talking about the utter disaster of Crimewave. And Sam was our co-star (thankfully, he hadn’t joined SAG), reprising his role as the Cult Leader. Instead of Bruce, we found Brian Schulz, who was tall and handsome and could act, and I thanked heaven. No, he wasn’t Bruce, but he’d do. Best of all, I suddenly found myself making my first feature film.
To make absolutely certain that the movie would get shot, I spent $5,000 and bought enough film stock to shoot a full-length movie. A big, heavy box arrived from Kodak, that then sat in the middle of the office on the floor for the next three months while we worked around it and stepped over it. It was proof to everybody that we weren’t kidding.
We started shooting on my birthday, August 17, 1984.
Yet another day has arrived.