If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor (37 page)

Bruce: You had a decent budget this time.

Sam: Yeah, that was a whole new experience for me. It was giant. I had cranes and dollies and a crew of hundreds, makeup effects, helicopter battles over the city of Los Angeles, big stunts, explosions and miniatures. It was a great movie experience, but it was slightly more removed than our
Evil Dead
experiences, so it wasn't quite as fulfilling in many ways.

Bruce: How was it creatively? Did you get hassled?

Sam: Well it took just forever for them to green-light the script -- I went years. Finally, I said, "If I don't get a call saying that the movie's finally going to go, because I've spent three years of my life on this thing and it's not like I'm trying to make an art picture, I'm selling out to you -- if you don't call me by ten o'clock, I'm out." Ten o'clock came and went and I had a bottle of champagne and I went, "Fine, at least I'm free of it." They called around eleven: "All right we'll make your movie." They really make sure they've messed with ya.

Little did Sam know, that was just the beginning.

With nothing to lose, it was a great "fly on the wall" experience for me. Sam had his hands full with an extensive amount of optical effects for the film so he turned much of the early sound work over to me. Sam and I had worked closely on the sound for all of our previous films, so he felt comfortable with my input.

"Doing the sound" meant sitting in with actors as they replaced any missing or unusable dialogue, creating a temporary (temp) music track from CDs, overseeing sound effects editing, and supervising the mixing of all these elements.

One of the first dividends for Sam was my ability to scream. You'd think a scream is a scream is a scream, right? Not true -- there are infinite variations, from a nervous whimper to the pedal-to-the-metal wail of agony. At Sam's encouragement and often insistence, my screams wound up filling in for almost every criminal who was shot, run over or tossed off a high object.

My voice filled in for star Liam Neeson in the early stages, when he wasn't available to loop. Ironically, one dub of mine, a distant call of "Juuulieee!" made its way into the final version.

Darkman
allowed me to see, firsthand, how a film can literally change genres under studio leadership. There was much discussion about whether the film was a
Beauty and the Beast
story, or a darker
Phantom of the Opera
tale. As a result, I saw versions of the film that were almost all romance, immediately followed by versions that were mostly action -- in the end, it wound up being a hybrid of both.

I also had the unpleasant task of supervising a looping session with Frances McDormand in New York (Liam's love interest in the film) where she witnessed, reel by reel, the wholesale butchery of her most dramatic scenes.

Fran: Wait a minute. Where's the scene in the apartment?

Bruce: Oh, that. They're working with a version that doesn't have it right now...

Fran: What about the scene in the lab -- my big speech?

Bruce: Well, Fran, you might say the film is in a state of flux right now. For all I know, the scene could be put back in tomorrow...

That was true, because the "test screening" process had not yet begun. Let me give you an example of how it works: Acme Test Marketing company approaches would-be audience members in local malls, asking them if they want to see a free, "new and exciting film" from the guy who made the
Evil Dead
films. Once they get enough participants, they hold a screening at a real movie theater in, say, Glendale, California.

The film is then shown to this "test" audience, and they are asked to remain afterward to fill out a questionnaire, answering queries like:
Would you recommend the film to your friends? What scene did you like the most, and why?
etc.

Around twenty audience members also volunteer to stay after the screening, to participate in a "focus group." Here, one of the marketing gurus will, a la Jerry Springer, encourage audience members to voice general and sometimes outrageously specific opinions about the film.

Afterward, the cards are collected and the film is scored for its approval rating. If any particular scene bothered the audience, chances are good that it will be cut out -- a good example of this came when they butchered my favorite scene. Allow me to explain:

In
Darkman,
a wealthy developer attempts to woo Darkman's girlfriend after he is supposedly killed during a lab experiment. The man is charming and magnetic, but he's also a creep and should be avoided.

This point is very convincingly made in a scene where the same developer, alone in his apartment, stands at the foot of his bed wearing nothing but a bath towel. He picks up an ornate box and lifts the lid, sending a shimmering reflection across his face. He spreads the contents of the box across his bed, revealing gold coins. The developer then drops his towel and dives, buck-ass naked on the coins, writhing in ecstasy -- he is clearly a man with a problem.

The next day, he appears in his office, charming as ever, but the audience, now knowing his terrible secret, will never look at him the same way again. I found this scene to be extremely effective for what it was supposed to accomplish: make us loathe this man and fear for Darkman's girlfriend when he makes advances.

However (and herein lies the rub), many of the questionnaires returned with that scene mentioned as the one the audience liked the least, reasoning that it "made them uncomfortable."

Hello! That was the idea!
Instead of applauding the filmmaker's success to this end, the studio insisted that the scene be cut from the film.

After all was said and done,
Darkman
finally opened in theaters and went to number one. Sam and I used to joke about that back in Ferndale -- if any of us ever got to the top of the
Variety
movie chart, we'd call each other and engage in phony mogul dialogue.

"Who's on top? Who's on top?" Sam would ask.

"You are, Sam, you are..."

Sam: I couldn't believe that we had the number one movie.

Bruce: In its first week, right?

Sam: Yeah, then it was number two after
Ghost.
It was great to be number one in the country.

35

EVIL DEAD GOES HOLLYWOOD

Riding on the heels of a successful
Darkman,
Sam and Rob were able to set up the financing for another
Evil Dead
sequel relatively easily through a combination of Dino DeLaurentiis (foreign money) and Universal Studios (domestic money).

With a shooting schedule of 111 days, the new film,
Army of Darkness,
far outreached any challenge the three of us had faced thus far.

Army of Darkness
became the awkward challenge of reconciling high school with Hollywood. With a
starting
budget of eight million, we had outdone our
Evil Dead
budget by 22.8 times, yet because it was directly linked with our past, there was a yearning to do things like the old days.

On the production side of things, we had to hire a number of people we had never worked with before because this film called for large sets, horses, extras, and a complicated special effects process called "Introvision." But, when it made sense, we did our best to get familiar faces in front and behind the camera. John Cameron was brought in as first assistant director.

John: It was a real movie in that kind of nonunion world; the crews were competent and good, but the shoot was too long. Typical of Sam, and I think it's a good thing, every shot becomes an epic in and of itself -- if there's one torch, you've got to have a hundred standing by because he's going to keep building it through each rehearsal until it's bigger and bigger.

Bruce: Plus, the other theory would be if he had thirty extras, he was gonna put them in every shot.

John: He really wanted armies of thousands and of course that was out of the question.

Casting was another way to keep familiar faces around us. A Super-8 regular for years, Tim Quill, was new to the California scene. He was eager to give this professional thing a whack, yet we had to prove to the Screen Actors Guild that he was experienced enough to qualify for membership. It was difficult for them to accept the fact that he had been "really funny" in our 1974 classic,
No Doughboys.
Tim was eventually let off the hook because he was willing to shave his head for the role.

Sam's brother Ted also showed up -- not to play just one role, but four. He was a panic-stricken villager, a doubting warrior, a loyal follower, and a stockboy at S-Mart. At least the art of Shemping was still alive in
Army of Darkness.

Josh Becker also stopped by for a couple days as an extra.

Josh: I was a villager when you were thrown down in the pit. Sam put me next to Embeth (the lead actress), because he needed someone he could trust next to the starlet. Then I came out for a couple different nights as a skeleton.

Bruce: Oh really? Did you wear one of those monster suits?

Josh: Yeah, it was horrible -- there was no fly in them. Really good thinking...