If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor (8 page)

Josh Becker, whom I sat behind in study hall, was absolutely insane about movies. His tastes leaned toward Hollywood's golden era of cinema and his knowledge of motion picture trivia was (and still is) dizzying.

Josh and I both got parts in the eighth-grade play,
The Lottery.
Josh was an early bloomer, and snatched a plum role from me simply because the bastard could grow a full beard.

As a school project, Josh filmed an early adaptation of
Oedipus Rex
in 8mm. Mike Ditz photographed it and I played King Creon. I think Josh was impressed, not with my acting abilities, but because I brought my own embroidered toga.

"Jane Gordon baked baklava for her project," Josh remembered. "She got an 'A' and I got a 'C.' Admittedly, it was good baklava and it was a bad movie."

But Josh was undeterred -- his next production,
Super Student,
was much more ambitious. To pull off the story of a student with super powers, he got permission to film all over the school and even got teachers to play themselves.

The finished product was screened for the entire school in the auditorium. I remember thinking --
that rat bastard! --
I was making stop-motion stuff with Mike Ditz and was lucky if my parents would watch. This guy got the whole school to see his movie.

Josh's neighbor, Sam Raimi, recalled seeing it as well.

"That was a great movie," Sam noted. "The audience cheered because he made the assistant principal disappear, then he made the whole school disappear. He was the Steven Spielberg of the year."

Josh and Sam had actually met many years earlier, at their bus stop.

Bruce: Did you, like, torment Sam at the bus stop?

Josh: No, no, no, I never tormented Sam. Sam tormented
me
for years.

Bruce: How did he do that?

Josh: Sam had too much energy first thing in the morning. He never seemed to shut up. All I wanted to do was sit and smoke cigarettes, but he had to either practice his magic tricks for me or knock over the stop sign.

Bruce: What do you mean?

Josh: There were those poles that were white and then black at the top --

Bruce: They're, like, to keep you from going over into a ravine or something.

Josh: Right. He would stand on top of that, put his foot on the stop sign, and shake it --

Bruce: Why would he do that?

Josh: He was trying to knock it down without going to a lot of effort. Each year, the county would come out and do road work and they'd find this thing bent in half. And so they'd take it and they'd shove it deeper and each year it would get shorter.

Sam Raimi was a different bird entirely. My first glimpse of him, in eighth grade, was in the middle of the hallway, dressed as Sherlock Holmes, playing with dolls. Sam claims that he was just making a film.

"It was a shot of me being confused," he insisted. "I think I was hit on the head. The crook hits me on the head, I'm knocked out and I wake up and I don't know what's happening and all the people are supposed to be walking by me or something..."

I met Sam officially in drama class at Wylie E. Groves high school in 1975. An assignment to perform a pantomime made fools out of us both. Sam decided to portray a man on a unicycle. To do this, he stomped his feet on the stage rhythmically, as though he were pedaling.

Novel,
I thought,
but the guy is one weird wolf.

My pantomime depicted the intangible concept of "tension." I figured if I pulled on an imaginary rope long enough, something would be conveyed. James Moll, our teacher, couldn't figure out what the hell I was trying to achieve and gave me a "C."

Sam didn't fare any better that day and we exchanged condolences. "Hey, pal, that was good," Sam said. "Whatever it was you were trying to do..."

Sam had been making films in his own neighborhood since 1972. As it turned out, he had access to a strange new toy -- a video camera. A neighborhood friend of his owned a black-and-white, reel-to-reel setup. The concept of seeing images immediately after doing a "skit" was remarkable -- no need to hound the photo department at Kmart for days on end. Even so, it was eventually abandoned because of its lack of portability.

Sam first met Scott Spiegel in high school biology, but they didn't become friends right away.

Sam: Yeah, I was aware of Scott.

Bruce: Did you sit next to him?

Sam: No, I didn't sit next to him. Scott and I didn't get along quite at first. We slowly got to know each other.

Bruce: Scott was kind of a joker, right?

Sam: He was a real joker. I asked him for Moe Howard's address (of the Three Stooges) and he wouldn't give it to me.

Bruce: He had it, though?

Sam: I knew he did, but he wouldn't share it with me. I thought that was really rude.

Eventually, Scott coughed up the address and Sam joined this expanding group. His first role, as was almost always the case, was a thug in
No Doughboys
-- a gag fest about wayward delivery boys.

I met John Cameron relatively late -- in high school home room. John was impossibly tall and thin -- sort of like John Cleese if you stretched him out of proportion. John had a biting sense of humor, perhaps because he was a fellow Scot, and he wound up specializing in ill-tempered customers in our early Super-8s.

John also met Sam in high school.

John: I was on a lunch break. I was hanging out in a courtyard with Mike Ditz and eating my brown bag lunch, peanut butter and jelly or whatever, and Sam ambled by and Mike knew him and he introduced us -- whatever that means at that age. And I recall acting like a jerk because Sam seemed like a fake name. We used it when we played Army. I thought he was lying, so I tormented him for the rest of the time we were in this little courtyard. "Okay
SAM.
No problem
SAM,"
and he has since told me that he thought I was like the biggest jerk for the longest time.

Bruce: You were being horribly mean to him.

John: I didn't believe him. He seemed like a wisenheimer and was pulling my leg.

By this time, John had also met Josh outside the C-9 bathroom -- the designated smoking area at school.

John: I saw him every day. I didn't know his name or anything, but Josh was always good for a free butt. He also had the longest hair of anybody that I ever knew.

Bruce: Did he have a beard then, because when I met him in eighth grade, he had a beard.

John: Yeah, he had the beard and he always wore a pinstriped suit jacket with jeans.

Eventually, Sam, Josh, John, Mike and I all merged with the Spiegel camp. Now, between us, we had cameras, projectors, editing equipment and lights -- everything we needed to do more fully blown projects. It wasn't Hollywood, but a lot of film was being shot.

We got serious enough to form the Metropolitan Film Group and even issued business cards, but it was an operation where many of the traditional film jobs overlapped. Whoever bought the film and made the most phone calls became the producer, and anyone who came up with a basic concept was considered the writer. Directing was often handled by more than one of us at the same time.

Aside from the usual adolescent bickering, things ran smoothly with the exception of scheduling. A pie fight in Scott's
No Doughboys
on Friday night might require the actors Josh was using in
The Topanga Pearl.
Likewise, Sam's
Its Murder!
might need the same camera that John's
Shemp Eats the Moon
was using -- such were our teenage problems.

Birmingham, Michigan, the nearest "city," became our back lot. Sunday afternoons resulted in empty alleys and a lower traffic volume -- ideal for filming. Police were routinely called to our film set to investigate reports of some "person" being thrown off a parking structure. After several years of this, the police knew us by sight.

"Oh, it's
you
guys. That's a better dummy than last time."

"Yeah, we fixed this one so the legs won't bend backwards!"

The woman at the local Kmart photo department got to know us, too.

"Scott, how did
Three Pests in a Mess
turn out?" she'd inquire.

We owed a lot to expiration dates. With Scott and I working at a local IGA, any excuse to end a film with a food fight was good enough for us. The plea to our boss, Danny, would go something like this:

"Hey, Danny, these Boston creme pies are all expired. You're gonna pitch them, right?"

"Let me guess -- you guys are filming this weekend."

"Yeah."

"(sigh) Go ahead -- take 'em."

The Walnut Lake Market also provided us with an endless supply of boxes. If the plot didn't require pies, it surely would have some guy's car ramming through a pile of boxes -- our idea of a "stunt." As our approach to filming became more ambitious, pies and boxes weren't enough anymore.

Sam's house had the best stairs to fall down. The sweeping staircase in his foyer had a good "grade" and was carpeted -- always a plus. There, Sam and I perfected the art of the "stair fall."

Sam: That staircase had just enough slope.

Bruce: It was perfect -- curved and so you couldn't get too much speed.

Sam: You could use the wall as a brake sometimes. You could rub your elbows --

Bruce: Or drag your heels. As soon as your legs go over your head, you start dragging those heels. You could control the speed.

Sam: Arcing.

Bruce: Right, the shoe scrapes left on the wall would be in an arc.

Other types of falls were to follow: the cliff tumble, the soapy floor wipe-out, the bicycle dump and the parking structure bail-out.

Moving vehicles offered up a whole new challenge. As an indestructible teenager, I thought nothing about leaping from car to car as they raced down the street or, when needed, being dragged by one -- but smashing my head into concrete was a different matter.

For Sam's
Bogus Monkey Pignut Swindle,
a crime caper, I took a dive into what I
thought
was a stream. Eighteen inches below the water, however, my skull met with a slab of discarded concrete. Nonetheless, my credo remained the same: As long as it was captured on film, it was worth it.