11/2/22
Newletter146
The Crack of Dawn
The bunch of us here in Detroit all started making Super-8 movies when we were about fourteen. By the time were eighteen we were all making a pretty big deal out of our productions, and of course, the budgets kept going up. One hundred dollar productions became five hundred dollar productions, that then became one thousand dollar productions. We peaked out with Sam’s movie, It’s Murder! (1979), and my movie, Stryker’s War (1980), both films exceeding $5,000. [When I say “Sam’s movie” or “my movie,” that means we were the writer and director. Bruce Campbell co-produced everything. There were several other members of this group, one of whom was John Cameron, who has had a big career and produced many of Joel and Ethan Coen’s movies].
Most of the money for these films we supplied ourselves from working various low-end jobs. But our ambitions were bigger than our salaries, and we needed more money. Scott Spiegel worked as a the manager of a grocery store owned by two Chaldean brothers, Jimmy and Danny Lossia. [As a note for those outside the Detroit area, Chaldeans are Christian Iraqis]. Most weekends Jimmy and Danny had a big poker game that had reasonably high stakes (at least it looked that way to us) with other well-to-do Chaldeans (they all drove Buicks). And this is how the deal worked: if Scott and I were willing to show up and sit there for several hours watching these men play poker, and accept the fact that we would now be the butt of many of their jokes, when they were done playing they would leave all of the money on the table and we could take it to make movies. There would be $500-1,000 on the table. We didn’t resort to this method very often – three or four times – but it was invaluable to all of our careers.
When I was making Stryker’s War, the Ben Hur of Super-8 movies, I was working as a security guard at night on a big construction site where they were building a complex of senior citizen housing. It was an easy job and I wrote an entire sci-fi script while working there. And then the movie gods blessed me. The company laid me off and I was now entitled to unemployment. For the one and only time in my life I went on the dole. Once a week I went to the unemployment office in Royal Oak [next door to the Royal Oak Post Office, where a fellow had recently gone mad, brought in a weapon and shot up the place, killing some people, and from where the term, “Going Postal” came from]. Anyway, I looked at the money as my state film subsidy.
I used Stryker’s War as a sales tool to show potential investors to raise money to make a feature version, which was Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except.
But were it not for the kindness of Danny and Jimmy Lossia, and several other Chaldean big shooters, would we have made as many Super-8s as we did. God bless them one and all.
The reason it was only Scott and I attending these poker games, and Bruce and Sam did not attend, was because one of these Chaldean men’s running jokes was that if we didn’t get rich and famous and give them their money back, they’d break our legs. Well, Scott and I knew they didn’t really mean it, but Sam and Bruce took them seriously. Schmucks.
And so we blast off into another day.