6/17/23
Newsletter #370
The Crack of Dawn
I moved from the Berkeley City Club to the Sheraton in San Rafeal. Now I have a TV and a coffeemaker and I’m much happier.
Last night my buddy John (who reads this newsletter) said that I should tell the story about Sam with the stuntman on Evil Dead 2. I thought that I already had. Were I at home I could check, but it’s a good story, so what the hell?
We were shooting in a gravel pit – a running theme through our productions – and it was about 115 degrees. All of us extras were dressed in full armor with black, thermal, Union suits underneath, and I was as hot as I’ve ever been in my life. I was truly ready to drop dead of heat prostration. There was a little spit pond at the center of the pit with an inch of fetid water at the bottom. I spent two entire days scooping out greenish water with a coffee cup and pouring it on the back of my neck, hoping to not die.
I know that I’ve referred back to those two days in the gravel pit a few times – that’s where I met the beautiful art director, Elizabeth, whom I went out with later in L.A. – and perhaps I’m retelling a story, but so what?
There is a sequence in Evil Dead 2 where the character Ash (Bruce Campbell) falls down an extremely steep cliff. Sam can usually bully Bruce into doing almost anything, but this was obviously too dangerous of a stunt for Bruce that required a stuntman. Bruce’s stuntman was John Casino, who looked surprisingly like Bruce, but was bigger and broader. Since they were both in the same outfit, I confused the two of them a few times during that shoot.
As the entire cast and crew watched, Sam and John Casino walked up to the top of about a fifty-foot tall sheer cliff of dirt and began to discuss the stunt. Sam spent several minutes explaining what he envisioned, but he appeared unable to get across in words exactly what he meant. Finally, he said, “I’ll show you,” and promptly flung himself off the edge of the cliff. As we all watched, Sam came down the hill ass-over-teakettle like a Raggedy Andy doll; not like a stuntman. Sam hit the ground with a thump, then didn’t move. We all felt pretty sure that we had just watched the film’s director throw himself down a cliff, break his own neck and kill himself. After a moment, Sam slowly rose to his feet and was miraculously alive. I’m sure that John Casino, who was fifty feet up on top of the cliff, had learned a lot from watching Sam fall down the hill. On the next take John fell down the hill like stuntman, rolling and sliding and making it look dangerous without actually hurting himself, and that’s what’s in the movie.
Bruce told me that the next morning Sam confessed to him, “When I got up this morning, I was pissing blood.”
But wait, I’ve got a bit more. I know that I’ve written about being the final hand holding a sword that comes up into frame in the last shot of the movie. To refresh your memories, Ash stands in front of a castle (which was a facade in the background) hollering, “Nooooooo!” as the crowd raises their swords and chants, “Hail he who fell from the sky,” and the camera pulls back through the crowd. The shot ends with two swords coming straight up: first was the sword of Rob Tapert, the producer, then mine, then cut to black. The end. Anyway, it was extremely difficult to get these swords to come up straight so close to the lens, and we ended up shooting and reshooting the shot many times. Since it started getting dark, Sam finally accepted a take, but let us all know that it wasn’t perfect, and – thank God – it was Rob’s fault, not mine.
So, I wrote about that in this newsletter. Rob wrote back to me, from a fishing boat somewhere in the Indian Ocean, that Sam had just given him shit about fucking up the last shot of Evil Dead 2 like three days earlier. We shot that picture in 1986, almost 40 years ago, and Sam is still bitching about it.
The day has begun here in San Rafeal.
Sam had a lot of practice tumbling down the Raimi staircase