4/9/23
Newsletter #301
The Crack of Dawn
As my agoraphobic character in Lunatics: A Love Story, Hank (Ted Raimi), is going nuts in his apartment he can’t leave, I had to keep thinking up more and more crazy stuff that could happen in the apartment. I thought it would be funny if he decided to put on some mellow music, but instead got a rap song. A moment later the rap band appeared, began pushing him around, then shoved his face down on the record to make the scratching noises.
Being a repressed lyricist, I wrote a rap song. Since Hank in his insanity has covered the walls of his apartment with tin foil (to keep out the x-rays), I called my song, Nervous Meltdown (The Reynolds Rap). Here are two verses:
The core in your brain is cherry red
There’s a crack in the reactor inside your head
When your fission and fusion do the wild thing instead
Yo man, you’re having a nervous meltdown
The spiders have your room under attack
They grow to be the size of a Cadillac
If they don’t go away your skull’s gonna crack
Yo man, you’re having a nervous meltdown
At casting we saw a dozen rap bands, all young black men, as might be expected. One band was clearly better than the others, so we cast them. I said, “Rehearse the song, and if there are any funky cool things you want to add, go ahead.” Well, they took this wrong. A few days later the lead member of the group called me and said, in essence, your song sucks – it’s a rap tune written by a white guy – and I’ve come up with something much better. I said, “OK, Bruce and I need to hear it right away” (Bruce Campbell was the producer). We were invited to the band’s lawyer’s office in a slightly funky part of Detroit.
The band’s lawyer was a slick, well-dressed, middle-aged black man. They also had their manager there. We all met in the conference room where they had a big beatbox. After the formalities, we said, “So, what have you got?” The lead rapper went into a lengthy song and dance about the grave difficulties of writing and recording a song so quickly. Uh-huh. After stalling as long as he could, he finally pushed play, and he had nothing – an electronic beat with no lyrics – although he assured us he had some great ideas. Bruce said to me, “Can I speak with you out in the hall?” We went out in the hall and Bruce said, “Fuck these guys. Let’s get another band and have them sing your song.” We went back in and Bruce told it the way it was, “That’s not a song. You didn’t try. You didn’t come up with anything. You’re fired.” They were aghast, saying, “But we already put in so much work.”
The second best band on the casting list was Detroit’s Most Wanted. They came into the office and I took a completely different approach. I gave them the lyrics and said, “This is the song. Don’t change it. You will be produced by our composer, Joe LoDuca. Do what he tells you to do.” They couldn’t have been happier. Joe took over and it was promptly and professionally handled.
Then Bruce began receiving persistent phone calls from a black, female attorney who told him to call her, “Lawyer Jones,” and wanted compensation for the first rap band’s studio expenses, which were hundreds of dollars. Well, Bruce was born to handle idiots like this. “And this would be for the studio where the band did not record the song? Is that the one you’re talking about? Do you have an invoice?”
Detroit’s Most Wanted showed up on their day of shooting completely prepared, totally geeked, wearing their own wacky outfits. Each of them held a 1989 cell phone the size of a brick, keeping them in their hands during the number. I finally asked, “What’s with the cell phones?” One of the rappers looked at me like I was an idiot and explained, “They’re gimmicks.”
Anyway, the scene turned out fine. Detroit’s Most Wanted actually went on and had a couple of songs that charted. Lawyer Jones continued to pester Bruce for the rest of the shoot. Since Bruce also played the mad doctor in the movie, he would occasionally be behind his producer desk in green hospital scrubs and footies. I can clearly see him on the phone with Lawyer Jones with his footies up on the desk. When someone is speaking to Bruce on the phone and he thinks it’s bullshit, he begins to fly the phone around like a toy plane, crashing it into things, occasionally attempting to put the entire phone in his mouth while saying, “Uh-huh.”
Today is my last day in Barcelona. I told the sexy, French Celine down at the seaside cafe that she was beautiful. I went to give her a business card and realized that both the phone number and the email address on my card are wrong. I have since corrected it with a pen. But it’s Sunday; will she be there? The Mediterranean certainly will be.
Hasta Lavista, suckers.