Apparently, world wide pandemics cause all sorts of lowlifes and scum to come out & start yowling. Today, comedian & failed sports color commentary guy Dennis Miller went on Sean Hannity’s show with some fresh “comedy stylings” about life in the times of coronavirus. Dennis — being Dennis — he sees it all from the coronavirus’ point of view.
Because that’s the kind of “person” Dennis is.
I think Dennis Miller is a very talented man. I do think he can be incredibly funny. But around all that funny is so much hurtfulness — Dennis makes the mistake of laughing at his audience rather than getting his audience to laugh with him. Comedians in general are not a happy bunch. That’s why they do comedy. It’s part of their therapy.
Dennis is an unhappy man. I’m sorry for him. But he needs to work on himself before inflicting himself on any more people. Not that that’s going to happen any time soon.
Clearly, Dennis Miller has not changed one iota since I worked with him while making the feature film “Tales From The Crypt Presents Bordello Of Blood” in 1994. As a matter of fact, the story of that movie fills a whole chapter in a book I’m writing — “How To Live Bullshit Free: A Practical Guide To Not Killing Yourself”. The chapter about Dennis is called “Bordello Of Blood: How NOT To Make A Movie”.
I wrote & produced the show Tales From The Crypt for 4 seasons (everything after season two). It was a great gig. How could it not be considering the amazing people I got to work with while doing that show. With very few exceptions (a handful of people, really), everyone I got to work with from the very biggest people (the first thing Tom Hanks ever directed was an episode of Tales From The Crypt for me) to the craft services person was awesome. It was awesome on steroids.
We also got to make two Tales From The Crypt feature films — “Demon Knight” and the aforementioned “Bordello”. “Demon Knight” has achieved a kind of minor cult status. It’s a pretty good movie — very well directed by the super talented Ernest Dickerson and the cast is wonderful to a person (Jada Pinkett, Bill Sadler, Billy Zane, CCH Pounder, Charles Fleischer, Thomas Haden Church, Dick Miller). Bordello, on the other hand…
It’s got its fans. But I’m not one of them. I know too much. I was there every stinking day of that movie’s inception, pre-production, post-production & post-post production. Part of me still lives in that goddamned thing’s shadow.
For real.
Like I said — I wrote a book. I write openly, candidly & very, very honestly about Dennis (and a lot of people whose names you probably know: Sylvester Stallone, Angie Everhart, Joel Silver, Cory Feldman, Bob Zemeckis — and Dennis Miller). I didn’t write the book to settle any scores. I have none to settle. The book is me walking through my life to point out where I (I now realize) made mistakes that I now choose to build on (having survived a deep, deep depression and a suicide attempt).
The point is — on part of my journey, I worked with Dennis Miller. He’s a talented man but an asshole. If he insists on opening his yap — I’ll open mine.
I’ve included the whole chapter here. I apologize if all you want is the Dennis Miller dirt — it’s in there. But I do promise the rest of the story is worth your time. It’s hilarious. Painfully hilarious (painful to me mostly — making that movie was a daily dose of the Battle of Waterloo). And Dennis features prominently in that nightmare.
Imagine — having a nightmare experience while making a horror movie.
As my non-writing producer friends like to say “It practically writes itself”.
CHAPTER FOUR
BORDELLO OF BLOOD: HOW NOT TO MAKE A MOVIE
If you’ve never been to Vancouver, British Columbia, you’re missing something.
Flying into it can take your breath away (same as flying into LA can – on a clear day when you can see all the way from Catalina to the San Gabriels). There’s the same juxtaposition of ‘gleaming city’ against a backdrop of mountains. But, while LA sprawls like a languid teenager, Vancouver sits properly, its posture perfect.
Vancouver is really, really Canadian in all the best ways. And it’s perched between so much Natural Beauty it should be illegal.
The first time I ever visited Vancouver was while Gil was shooting The Hitchhiker for HBO.
From the point of view of the American entertainment business (there IS a Canadian Entertainment Business, too) – Vancouver is a service town. In our case, American productions – originating in LA – use Vancouver because labor is less expensive and the exchange rate between the American & Canadian dollars usually favors us. Canadian productions also used Vancouver as a service town – for productions originating in Toronto.
Back when Gil first worked up in Vancouver, the talent pool (crew-wise) wasn’t anything like it is now: deep. When Gil first started working in Vancouver, there were about two good, professional-caliber crews. After that, you couldn’t be sure what you were getting. Not that the people weren’t well-meaning and talented – they just lacked the experience that most larger American productions preferred.
When we arrived in Vancouver to scout ‘Bordello of Blood’, the situation had improved considerably. Still, as we cleared customs, Gil and I, Greg Melton our production designer and Tom Priestley, our director of photography, weren’t thinking about the crew we’d get or the city we’d be getting it in. We were miserable.
Our very skilled Vancouver production manager – Colleen Nyquist – set us up in the Sutton Place Hotel and got to work shuttling us around. But none of us wanted to make the movie we were there to make.
I don’t know for sure why Universal cancelled ‘Dead Easy’ and made us do ‘Bordello of Blood’ but I’ve always had my suspicions. Again – I don’t know this but – here’s my theory…
At the time (1994), a company called DREAMWORKS had just formed. For those who don’t know, this is the Entertainment Behemoth created by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. From the moment it launched, everyone wanted to be in business with them. Who wouldn’t? That, I believe was what scared Universal Pictures – who became worried about one of the prizes in their talent stable – my boss Robert Zemeckis.
Just as I see Bob Z as my mentor, Bob saw Steven Spielberg as one of his. And Universal – my theory – was afraid that Bob might migrate his deal away from them and TO Steven (David & Jeffrey) and their brand-spanking-new High End Production Company. Among Bob’s strengths is fierce loyalty. And one of the people that Bob Z has always been incredibly loyal to is his original writing partner Bob Gale. The Two Bobs wrote all the ‘Back To The Future’ movies together – and Bob Gale is a First Class Writer. But he’s not a director in the way Bob Z is (though Bob Gale has directed).
The Two Bobs met when both were film students at USC. The Film Department, at the time, wasn’t the Juggernaut it is now. It was the late 70’s – Academia loved the French New Wave and hated Hollywood. The two Bobs preferred Hollywood. They thrived nonetheless at USC. Wrote a ‘first screenplay’ together: “Bordello of Blood”.
It is entirely possible that at some point, because he’s a great and loyal friend, Bob Z (and, perhaps because also it gave Bob Z a way to ‘help’ Universal keep him on their roster instead of leaving for DreamWorks’) asked Universal to purchase “Bordello”. They did. For $500,000.
Having spent half a million bucks (again, I’m speculating based on what I know), Universal wanted to ‘lay off’ the money – find a way to spend it rather than lose it. And then it struck them – they already HAD a project on their schedule that would solve their problem.
Next thing ya know, ‘Dead Easy’ is dead. We were now making ‘Bordello of Blood’ as the second Crypt movie (whether we liked it or not). And, while they were having a go at all our hearts, Universal turned to me and said, ‘You’ll rewrite the script, yes?’
As in ‘You’ll re-write your boss…’. Feeling like I was being set up to lose, I called Bob to ask what he wanted from this. “Go make a movie,” he said, genuinely. He told us not to worry about rewriting the script. Whatever the script evolved into was just as good as what it already was. That helped. But it did not put any of the toothpaste back into the tube. The assignment was still ‘Bordello’ and not ‘Dead Easy’.
Let’s be real – creative latitude was limited. We were prepping for a movie script we’d only just read. Just because we’d stopped making one movie and started making another didn’t mean the clock had stopped. We were given a few more weeks to prep – pushing our start date into mid-summer; the goal was to have the movie ready to distribute by The following Halloween (1996).
There wasn’t time to re-invent anything. And THIS was the script the studio bought. They didn’t have a problem with it. It said ‘Zemeckis’ on it. That’s what mattered – and it did make total sense – from their point of view.
This is a good time to digress and explain WHY I’m even bothering to tell this story: The making of ‘Bordello of Blood’, a movie that, really, nobody cares about. It ain’t the movie itself that’s the point. It’s the deeply flawed process by which we made Bordello that’s instructive.
I’ve mentioned before that the assembled talent and experience should have at least produced a polished turd at the end of all the squeezing and straining. Instead we produced a below average turd. Over the course of the two+ years we spent working on the project, we might have made every conceivable mistake possible – and a few really creative ones no one had thought of before. Hooray for us.
From the get-go, we were making a movie we didn’t like. As you’ll see, we cast actors we shouldn’t have, shot the movie in a place we shouldn’t have, treated our Canadian crew in a way we shouldn’t have, and, for good measure, treated the fact that we were IN Canada in a way we shouldn’t have.
We didn’t make these mistakes for any reason other than the fact that we were hooked on our own bullshit.
When I watch ‘Bordello’ these days – through fingers splayed over my eyes – I am mostly aware of how the Making of Bordello was a kind of ‘Master Class’ on ‘How NOT To Make A Feature Film (or a TV show for that matter). But it’s so much more than that. ‘Bordello of Blood’ is like a master class in ‘Bullshit’ itself.
The movie story was basic: Down-on-his-luck detective discovers a local mortuary is actually fronting a den of voracious female vampires.
That’s it. The whole shebang: a movie about vampire whores. It doesn’t sound quite as awful to me now as it did then. But it doesn’t hold a match to the movie we were supposed to be making
I put the ‘money’ – what little of it there was – into the two main characters – RAFE and KATHERINE. I won’t even pretend that we ever talked in detail about the characters, who they were, why they did whatever the fuck they did… It was hard to justify anything any of the characters did. That’s why we made them quirky instead.
Unless we’re talking about Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn’s character in ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’ – whose quirkiness is the point), most writers make a character quirky because they hope like hell that the boring secretary’s compulsion to build cheddar cheese castles with fudge-and-boysenberry turrets in her filing cabinet makes her less boring. Only if we get to the bottom of WHY she’s doing it could she be even remotely interesting. But no one is that quirky: Quirky for no reason.
And yet, we went there with Rafe Gutman. He was quirky-for-no-reason.
I cannot tell you how HARD it is to write a character or a scene if you don’t intrinsically understand them. How can you write dialogue for a character whose voice you can’t hear or whose thoughts you can’t ‘speak’? How would you really know what they’d do?
In order to write a character, you have to understand them from the inside out and on the most intimate level. Actor Robert DeNiro was famous early in his career, for knowing how to play a character only after he could say definitively what the guy had in his pockets. Writing a character is like that. Only deeper.
If you really know what you’re doing, the characters literally speak for themselves. They really do just – ‘speak’ – while you type away furiously, trying to keep up with them.
RAFE GOODMAN, the hero of Bordello, never spoke for himself like that. He came to us a small town detective – in an environment (small towns) where a detective probably wouldn’t find a lot of work (remember – college kids with limited real-world experience imagined this; they grew up to be very talented filmmakers, but they WEREN’T talented filmmakers when they wrote this script). Not seeing a way toward real and relatable, we plunged deeper into ‘quirky’.
We made Rafe’s office an abandoned movie theater. Couldn’t tell ya why. Inside, the seats were all stripped away and Rafe’s desk was set up just beneath where the screen used to hang. Surrounded by junk and chaos. Quirky by the bucket.
To make it quirkier still, we kept Rafe in the dark cos there’s always a movie being projected. Needing to somehow tie this back down to ‘reality’ and our story, we added one more quirk: Rafe was an aficionado of porn.
Which brings us to Katherine – now working as a church secretary – but, formerly, a well-known adult film actress named ‘CHESTY O’TOOLE’. You see where this is going, yeah?
Rafe turns out to have been a fan of Katherine’s when she was ‘Chesty’. So at least they have ‘something’ to talk about when they first meet. If the premise were any thinner, it would be in an ICU, hooked up to life support.
Katherine has come to hire Rafe to look into the disappearance of her good-for-nothing brother, Caleb. Rafe goes to the bar where Caleb was last seen – meets the same guy who directs Rafe toward the same funeral home.
But, when Rafe goes to the funeral home, nothing happens. The funeral home looks like a funeral home. Rafe stumbles onto the truth: there are vampire-prostitutes – living in the ‘basement’ where they hold nightly orgies that always end up with the vampire whores – led by Lilith, their self-appointed ‘queen’ – ‘consuming’ all the guests.
A taut, psychological thriller this was not.
One more ‘story’ complication: The church for which Katherine serves as secretary, is run by a charismatic televangelist who, it turns out, was responsible for bringing Lilith from the place where she’d been hidden to this very town where, the televangelist hopes, she will ‘consume’ all the sinners.
It doesn’t work out that way, of course. Does it ever?
The climax of the movie occurs – at night time – in the LARGE GLASS MEGA-CHURCH from which the Charismatic Televangelist broadcasts his Big-On-Production-Values religious services. The Good Guys live happily ever after while the villain gets it in the end. At least we think she does. It’s a horror movie, right – which means there never actually is an ending…
Revisions had to happen fast. The goal was to get up and running and into production as quickly as we could.
Script notes (thank you, Scott) were downright cruel. And absolutely right. It’s like in tennis (or most ball sports) – if you don’t play the ball, the ball will play you. For the first time, I was keenly aware of the politics going on all around – and how ill-equipped I was to engage in them.
There were other issues brewing. Since we weren’t going to New Orleans, the first thought was we’d shoot Bordello in LA. But the IA was still in the catbird seat. Our Los Angeles production would therefore be under a union contract – which was not in our budget.
Having no choice (and savoring a chance to stick it right back to the IA), Joel decided to move our production OUT of Los Angeles (which, in addition to being a big ‘Screw You’ to the IA also was a Big ‘Screw You’ to our crew). We should have put our foot down, Gil and I. I wish we had fought back at least a little.
But there was another possible reason for ‘Why Vancouver?’ Joel was about to go into production on “Assassins’ starring Sly Stallone and Antonio Banderas with Dick Donner directing. While ‘Assassins’ was shooting in Seattle, Joel could hop across the border to Vancouver – a quick 30 minute plane ride away.
So, just like that – we were off to Vancouver in May 1994 to meet and job interview Canadian production managers, scout locations and hunt for a stage space.
Now, let me say right here, right now – it is (almost) always wonderful being in Vancouver. If you could take ‘Bordello of Blood’ out of the experience of being in Canada (getting to keep the money, the per diem, the terrific housing), being In Vancouver was fantastic. It was summer. The days lasted forever. The restaurants (though not as incredible as they are now) were still incredible nonetheless. Canadians are unfailingly polite (even when they shouldn’t be). Take away the damned movie and being in Vancouver was like being PAID to go on vacation for four months.
Problem was, ‘Bordello of Blood’ & Vancouver were a package deal.
FIRST VISIT TO VANCOUVER
It is a natural human instinct to try and make lemonade from the couple of squished seeds, lemon skin and pulp life gave you. And so, we took our situation and began to concoct a lemonade stand in our heads. The only customers for the nasty ooze would be us but – by that point, if I remember, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome was beginning to kick in. We were still getting paid and we were still making a movie after all…
And being driven around Vancouver by Colleen – Our too-competent-for-us Production Manager – the idea of being in this beautiful place with its endless summer-long days filled with gorgeous light – it started to seduce us.
While we weren’t going to have our LA crew with us, we were going to bring up several key department heads – Production Design, Wardrobe and the Editor. Our production designer – Greg Melton – joined us for the trip north. Remember – the talent pool wasn’t anywhere near as deep as it is now. And we needed to maintain a continuity of look; Greg had been Crypt’s PD since Gil and I took over.
I never had the chance to tell Greg to his face what an amazingly talented person he is. I’ll do it here: Greg, man, you were consistently amazing.
Being an anthology, we never had the luxury of standing sets (aside from the Crypt). We had to (well, Greg had to) ‘reinvent the wheel’ every episode – create a whole world out of nothing – then tie it to locations we’d find outside the studio. Sometimes, the ‘guiding principle’ behind your production choices isn’t what’s on the page, it’s what’s expedient for the schedule. This is one of those places (in TV production) where literal circumstances on the ground often force you to invent, re-invent, write or re-write on the fly.
Having collaborators who can easily keep at your wing makes life so much easier and Greg Melton is a designer who can zig and zag like a Zen Master. Aside from once or twice, I don’t think I ever saw Greg sweat.
Also joining us for the ‘recky’ was our Director of Photography Tom Priestley.
We found all the locations we needed – including an abandoned power plant outside of town that would have cost a bomb to build. And – most important – we found the Crystal Cathedral-like church that plays throughout the script and where the movie’s climax would take place. Our church was actually the convention space at BC Place on the inlet just off English Bay.
Then Colleen pulled the last bit of ‘Wonderful’ from her pocket: A stage space big enough to build ANYTHING inside it with enough room for our whole crew and maybe every other crew in Vancouver. Just east of Downtown was an old, abandoned GM factory. With a quick cleaning, the offices became functional and the factory floor – which went on and on and on – became ‘The Home of Bordello of Blood’. How lucky for it.
We made our relationship with Colleen formal and, as we headed back to LA, she began to put her crew together.
BACK TO LA – CASTING
Turns out – even a disaster doesn’t always feel like a disaster. And we didn’t know yet – emphasis on ‘yet’ – that we were in the midst of a disaster. We were still feeling plucky, angry at our misfortunes and heady from having just spent a few nice days away in a beautiful location – working hard but eating well to make up for it. We felt ‘upbeat’ about Bordello. Okay, it wasn’t going to be the movie we wanted to make, but – the climax in the glass church was going to be awesome!
With that improving mind set, we started looking for actors. All the small parts would be cast up in Vancouver using the local talent pool. The leads and supports would all be cast in Los Angeles.
We had gotten pretty good response from the agencies when we sent out ‘Dead Easy’ – our New Orleans psychological thriller script – for casting. We did not get the same reception when we sent ‘Bordello of Blood’ out. Don’t get me wrong – the agencies all came back with lots of head shots. But they weren’t the ‘caliber’ of talent we’d gotten before. We weren’t surprised.
Joel focused on our leads. He casts instinctually – from his gut – his instincts having been mostly very good. But nobody’s perfect. Being the boss, Joel would have final say over three leads. Not having the same casting instincts as Joel, Gil and I focused on the script for casting clues. For Rafe, we liked Danny Baldwin. For Katherine – Bridget Wilson. And for our villain – Lilith – Robin Givens.
Joel liked how we were thinking but wanted time to come up with a few ideas of his own. We turned – reluctantly, uneasily – toward the secondary roles. There were four especially important ones: Reverend Current (the minor villain), Caleb (Katherine’s brother), McCutcheon (the funeral director) and Prather (the henchman).
For Reverend Current we got Chris Sarandon – lovely guy. Would work with him again in a heartbeat (I hope he still feels the same way).
For Caleb we went ‘family’: Corey Feldman. Corey had worked with Dick Donner on ‘The Goonies’ and Dick – being an empath – saw a kid desperately in need of a lot of TLC. I would not want to grow up in this business the way Corey did. It’s not good for your ‘soul’ (whatever you perceive it to be if you perceive it at all). The part was perfect for Corey and it made Dick happy that we could help Corey (and cast a good actor for the role in the process). Win-win. Not many of those to go around.
For McCutcheon, I asked our casting director – Victoria Burrows – to bring in (among the other actors) my friend Aubrey. Aubrey Morris (who passed away a little ahead of this writing) played Mr. Deltoid (a small but memorable role) in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (Mr. Deltoid is the ‘hero’ – Alex’s – parole officer; Aubrey plays Deltoid with a deliciously affected smarminess).
Excuse me while I geek out for a moment. Aubrey was a great dinner companion with thousands of amazing stories to tell about his career – including his career in the London theater. He appeared, when he was at the Young Vic, in a production of ‘Arms And The Man’ by George Bernard Shaw – a production Shaw saw; GB Shaw took a liking to young Aubrey.
You may not know the name George Bernard Shaw if you’re not a Drama Major or Theater Person. But, in the English Language – if we’re talking theater – there’s Shakespeare at the very top – and then there’s Shaw. He wrote ‘Pygmalion’ (which was turned into ‘My Fair Lady’), ‘Man And Superman’, ‘Candida’, ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’, ‘Major Barbara’. I studied Shaw at Vassar.
And here was my dinner companion telling me about having drinks with Shaw himself – and getting hit on by the Great Man.
I know we read other actors for Aubrey’s part but, fortunately, Gil felt as good about casting Aubrey as I did. In the greater scheme of things, having Aubrey to hang with was one of the few good things that happened during Bordello.
For the part of Vincent Prather, we read little people (because it was written that way), finally casting Phil Fondacaro. Now, I’ve worked with actors of short stature before. I don’t exactly tower over anyone myself. It never occurred to me that being of short stature gave Phil a particular kind of celebrity. An amazing kind of celebrity.
I had so much to learn still…
CASTING OUR LEADS: DENNIS MILLER
As I said – Joel casts instinctively. He goes with his gut. And his gut was screaming at him NOT to hire a Baldwin to play the lead in our movie, but to hire Dennis Miller instead. I honestly don’t know why. I can only assume that Joel liked Dennis’ comedy. I know it wasn’t Dennis’ politics.
Dennis Miller is a very talented man. He’s smart, well-read, intensely analytical. He’s funny, too, of course. And he’s Dennis Miller. People don’t show up for a job and suddenly turn into somebody else. We hired Dennis Miller and we got Dennis Miller.
That puts the onus squarely on us. But even Dennis knew he wasn’t right for the movie. His audience was not our audience. He hated the script.
He turned us down. Said he’d play the part only if we gave him $1 million – figuring that would be the end of the discussion. No one had paid him, to that point, anywhere near $1 million to act in a movie.
Joel said yes to Dennis. Yes to $1 million. That’s pocket change now, but back in 1994 – to us – that was more money than god. It was certainly more money than was in our budget for the actor playing that role. We had $500.000.
Universal wasn’t interested in Dennis – but wasn’t uninterested enough to FORCE us NOT to hire him (a bizarre conundrum). Universal more or less wanted us to take our money, go make our movie, give it to them and otherwise leave them alone. As far as Universal was concerned, we could have any actor we wanted – so long as WE made up the half a million dollar difference.
We tried one last time to plead for Danny Baldwin – for the budget’s sake. No dice. Hire Dennis, cut the budget. We chopped the money from the one place we had money to ‘play with’ – special effects makeup. We were cutting money from the thing our audience was coming to see – Great Special Effects Makeup – and putting it into an actor they couldn’t have cared less about.
Not a Phi Betta Kappa decision.
But, did we resist it as hard as we could have? The more I think of it now (hindsight being so warm and snuggly), we should have walked off the movie. We should have at least threatened to walk off.
We surrendered instead. That never seems to work out well.
THE ERIKA ELENIAK PROJECT
When Joel put forward the idea of Erika Eleniak instead of the actress we had read and wanted (Bridget Wilson), we were surprised and, actually, pleased. We liked the idea. A lot. But Erika brought baggage with her – of a kind.
While we knew we had Dennis about two weeks before shooting began, we didn’t cast Erika until the weekend after we began shooting (as usual, on a Thursday).
We had started with two fairly light days of work – scenes in the bar where we meet Caleb’s friends and the biker who turns them on to the bordello. I was having preliminary conversations with Erika’s agent about wardrobe and other minor issues when he dropped a bombshell on us: Erika had a problem with the script.
“A problem? What kind of ‘problem’? How can there be a problem – she said ‘yes’?”
“Erika is uneasy with her character’s past”.
“Her… past… You mean that she was a porn star?”
Bingo. Erika’s manager told me (I think with a straight face) that Erika didn’t want to play porn stars and strippers any more.
All well and good. Actresses should want to grow as artists. But she accepted the role of a porn star, I explained, trying to keep pieces of my brain from flying off into space. She said ‘yes’ to playing a former porn star who’s a character in a movie called ‘BORDELLO OF BLOOD’. Did her copy of the script come with a cover page that said ‘Hamlet’ by accident? I could appreciate her disappointment then.
But Erika’s manager was insistent. He didn’t care if the changes Erika needed screwed up story points including scenes we had already shot (okay – we hadn’t shot scenes that would be screwed up, but he was asking for the impossible). Except it had to be possible. Otherwise, Erika would not be getting on a plane the next day to be in wardrobe the day after that, and then on set the day after that.
I have a photo that was taken that Saturday. Gil and I had gone out for brunch with our wives. Before the food even arrived, Gil and I were outside on our phones – Gil putting out one series of fires and me begging Erika’s agent to please, please, please be reasonable.
It’s not like we could bore in on Erika’s character for insight and something to write about. Too much poking and prodding would bring the whole flimsy house of cards down. I needed a reason for Rafe to recognize Katherine. Her having sold him insurance once just wouldn’t cut it.
Finally, Erika’s manager relented – slightly. We settled on a compromise. Erika’s character had been an OVERWEIGHT porn star named not ‘Chesty O’Toole’ but ‘Plenty O’Toole’ and had slimmed down to the point where she was now unrecognizable as ‘Plenty’. My god – it even hurt to type that it sounds so idiotic.
But, the compromise got Erika onto a plane the next day and that was what mattered. I wasn’t allowing myself the ‘luxury’ of thinking about what impact that would have on the rest of the movie. I would drive off that bridge when I came to it.
THE ROAD TO ANGIE
Angie Everheart is a wonderful person. My experience of HER – just her (and not all the baggage that came with her) – was entirely positive. I liked her as a person. I respected her (and respect her still) as a person. I empathize with her. Empathized with what she was going through at the time with her significant other – Sylvester Stallone. The problem was she was acting in our movie. And we were asking her to do something not in her range (certainly not in her range then when she had just started acting).
As we entered pre-production, Joel was already in production on ‘Assassins’ in Seattle. At the time, Stallone was still engaged to Angie.
Apparently, one day, on set, Sly approached Joel with a ‘genius idea’ – to cast Angie in our movie as the villain. In the Real World, suggestions that strange get met with a cocked eyebrow. In the movie business it got a ‘Hmmmm, let me think about that…’.
Prior to casting Angie, we read about two dozen actresses. Lots would have worked. We gravitated toward Robin Givens. Word was she ‘could’ be a challenge to work with, but it would have been those same ‘odd angles’ in her personality that would have given shape to her version of the character. Remember – we don’t cast actors to act, we cast them to be.
Aside from Meryl Streep and a handful of technically genius English actors who really can vanish inside another human being’s psyche and being, we hire actors because of who they are and not because of who they can act like. Within the context of ‘who they are’, we need them to be brutally honest. We need them to expose their emotions as nakedly as they can.
In my opinion – Robin Givens would have been a better Lilith because she started out a lot more like Lilith. Less ‘acting’, more ‘being’.
But here again, Joel was listening to his guts and his guts were telling him he was ahead of the curve on the next Big Movie Trend – and the ‘Supermodel turned Super Star Actress’ wave was going to be led by Cindy Crawford when her movie ‘Fair Game’ opened.
Unfortunately, ‘Fair Game’ performed poorly at the box office and another ‘Great Movie Concept’ died on the vine.
But that was in a near future that would not benefit us. We wouldn’t learn in time that audiences didn’t care one way or the other about Super Models in Movies. It didn’t make anyone buy a ticket that wasn’t already going to buy one. We were going to be part of that data set.
We pointed out to Joel that what made Billy Zane’s performance in Demon Knight work so well was that he ‘had villain chops’ whereas Angie had more ‘sweet-natured-Super-Model’ chops. Joel wavered.
We learned that Billy Friedkin had worked with Angie – playing a small role in Billy’s feature Jade. We got Billy on the phone. “Can she handle the part,” we asked.
Billy paused. Too long. Way too long.
We thanked Billy, hung up and got Joel on the phone. What if we shoot a screen test, we suggested – hoping that by showing Joel what we meant – that Angie, while good, earnest and determined, just didn’t have the gravitas needed to play our Villain.
Joel responded excitedly. We had just stumbled on the way he’d play it to Stallone – who was advocating very hard for his fiancé. We’d shoot Angie’s screen test and show it to Joel who’d show it to Sly. Everyone would come to their senses and not do this to us, to the movie and to Angie.
Except when Joel and Sly sat down and watched Angie’s screen test, they zigged when zagging was expected. In retrospect, I suspect Sly wanted Angie on our movie set so that she wouldn’t hang around on his. We were being used as a kind of beard. The most important character in our horror movie was being cast as a means for another actor on another movie set to ‘have the freedom’ being in a committed relationship didn’t afford him – to fuck around. To philander.
For real.
In my mind, people can do whatever the fuck they want. They can behave like immature children every day of their lives if it’s what they want. But they do need to own their behavior. Our movie didn’t matter to Sly Stallone. Angie Everheart didn’t matter to him. I hope he’s been a big enough, secure enough man to own that.
For better or worse, Angie was now our movie villain.
I really, really want to be clear about this: I have no problem with Angie’s performance in ‘Bordello’. Once we cast her, we made a decision. And we KNEW – we absolutely knew – what the ramifications of that decision would be.
Allow me to jump forward in time 5 years to 1999. I’ve just been hired to go aboard ‘The Outer Limits’ as a Coordinating Producer. The first script I wrote for OL is called ‘Alien Radio’ – about a Howard Stern type radio guy who, after humiliating a desperate UFO Believer on the air, learns (when the UFO Believer dies horribly in front of him) that the UFO Believer was absolutely right – there ARE aliens – and they ARE living inside people…
I wrote the script thinking of Howard Stern. The actor-voice I had in mind was Denis Leary.
My chief executive producer on Outer Limits that first year – Richard Lewis – cast, as Joel did, instinctually (and, sometimes, with his own ulterior motives). Richard – for his own reasons – decided that the part should be played by the actor Joey Pantoliano – who Richard went ahead and hired.
Now, I had worked with Joey a few years before – on Crypt. I didn’t know Joey well, but I knew his ‘voice’. I knew his cadences – world-weary Jersey Guy with a bone dry wit.
When Richard cast Joey, he made a choice that ran counter to how the script was written. That doesn’t mean the choice was bad or invalid. It just means the actor and the part were starting out with a glaring incompatibility. Those don’t just vanish – they persist.
We shot ‘Outer Limits’ in Vancouver but our production offices – where Richard was most of the time – were in Los Angeles. My episode ‘Alien Radio’ was chosen to be first up for production. A small honor. Our show runner was uber-mensch Sam Egan. By the time Richard saw the first day’s dailies down in LA, we were already well into DAY 2 (of 7).
I had no problems with Joey’s performance in the first day’s work. But Richard, it turned out, did. He called me and before ‘Hello’ was even out of my mouth, Richard was asking me – pointedly – how the hell I could let Joey fuck up my script.
“What’s Joey doing to the script?” I asked (knowing what the answer was).
“His energy’s all wrong,” said Richard.
Well… kinda yes and kinda no. Kinda yes because the script was written for a different character type than Joey. But kinda no (almost entirely no actually) because Joey was playing Joey to perfection. “Joey’s doing a great job,” I told Richard, “He’s acting exactly the way we hired him to.”
“But he’s ruining the episode,” Richard insisted.
Again, he pressed me to ‘do something’ about Joey. Again, I put my foot down. I told Richard that I didn’t want to go to my lead actor on the second day we were working together to tell him, in essence, that I thought his performance sucked (when I absolutely did not). I did not want to tell him to ‘act like’ someone else – because that’s not a good idea. It would guarantee a confused, terrible performance and a toxic set.
I told Richard that if he wanted to tell Joey he was unhappy, he could do it himself. Richard demurred.
In part, I think, Richard saw that I was right. It IS like the old saw says – casting IS 90 percent of producing.
Angie gave us everything she had. I bet, if we had thought a little harder about how to work with her, how to play to her strengths, we could have helped her even more. That was our failure of imagination.
Playing villains is harder than it looks. For starters, you can’t ‘play’ it. You have to ‘be’ it. If you skipped over the previous digression, go back and read it.
The ‘Do It Like This’ example is Billy Zane in ‘Demon Knight’.
Billy was the perfect Crypt Feature villain – equal parts malevolent and sardonic. What we needed from Angie was a ‘Billy’ performance. That was asking a lot. And wasn’t like there was a whole lot on the page to work with.
ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?
Before production began, we had to approach our Canadian crew with a difficult request. Dennis, at the time, was doing a show for HBO. The show went up live on Friday evenings. That meant Dennis was not available to us Thursdays (for rehearsal) OR Fridays (or much of Saturday since he’d be traveling and recovering). On a tight schedule like ours, that was unworkable. So, we agreed with Dennis to shift our week – and make Thursday-Friday our weekends during production while we worked Saturday & Sundays (everyone else’s weekends).
Most American crews would do that without even thinking. Our Canadian crew had a problem. And rightfully so. Not getting to be with their families on weekends was not part of the deal they made with us. These wacky people had it in their heads that you work in order to live – not that you live in order to work. And – strange thing – working on our movie did not rise to the level of ‘So Important That You Do It Just Because’.
Coleen, our production manager put her reputation on the line. She promised her crew that the experience would be worthwhile. The crew relented – and began to regret it almost immediately. So did Colleen.
Monday morning rolled around. We had a female lead. We had two days in the can. We were feeling good and we were on location at one of Vancouver’s strip clubs.
Dennis had flown in the night before and was driven to the strip club, so he could meet Gil and we could all talk about Dennis’s work on the movie.
If the rest of the movie had been like the first ten minutes of meeting Dennis, regardless of how the movie turned out, the experience of making Bordello would have been fun, funny and fantastic. Dennis was low key and affable. He made a joke that relied on a ‘Bert Remsen’ reference. I laughed – because I knew who Bert Remsen was (he was a long-time character actor).
Dennis looked askance at me – surprised that someone would get an obtuse Bert Remsen reference. “Look at you, Katzy,” he said. He might even have been genuinely impressed with me. If he was, that didn’t stick. The name however did.
As we chatted, I learned that Dennis’ wife was Canadian – she was from Vancouver – so, for Dennis, his doing the movie was a kind of home-coming. Everything was lovely and Kumbaya. Inside my head I even flashed on Dennis and I becoming chummy over the course of working together – of finding synergy of some kind. Working together was going to be pure joy.
I drew Dennis aside to update him on the changes we had just made to the script – to Erika’s character. I handed him the latest draft.
Now, again, I have to contextualize. The script I handed Dennis – telling him, ‘please, feel free to contribute’ was entitled ‘Bordello of Blood’, not ‘Casablanca’. Dennis opened the script to his first scene and pointed to his very first line of dialogue. “I can’t say lines like this,” he said.
I looked at the line. Whatever it was, Dennis was right. It wasn’t written for Dennis. It wasn’t written in his cadences or his rhythms; and it was nowhere near as clever or witty or ‘Dennis’ as Dennis. As written, Dennis’ dialogue would have sounded silly coming from him. So, it was a Fact Of Life that Dennis was going to ‘tweak’ his dialogue at the very least.
“Here’s what I’ll do,” he said: He’d work with Gil to nail down what each of his scenes was about. Then, with that in mind, he’d ‘find’ his dialogue on his own. In other words, he’d improv.
It had ‘Danger, Will Robinson’ written all over it, but I said “Sure, Dennis” – adding quickly, “But you and I will work on it, too, right?”
Dennis nodded, smiling. But he had no interest in me helping him. Why would he? I had just handed him a script filled with proof that I had no idea how to write for him.
We moved on to the next topic – Dennis’ trailer. Because he was our million dollar star and because he was also doing his HBO TV show at the same time as our feature, we agreed to provide Dennis with the best, most tricked out, hi-tech (for the time) motor home in all of not just Vancouver but Western Canada – all so that Dennis could be in constant contact with his writers back in LA – not an unusual request for a comedian prepping for a weekly live broadcast on a major cable network.
The motor home, I assured Dennis, was already in place back at our studio space, ready for him to call it home.
We had a van take Dennis back to the hotel. Bordello was feeling like it might be all right as a film-making experience.
Meanwhile, another van headed to the airport – to pick up Joel who was flying in from his set in Seattle to spend a few hours on our set in Vancouver. But what sounded remarkably simple turned… well… remarkable – but for a lot of other reasons.
Before I go on, remember what I said earlier about Joel. He’s outrageous. He’s a little nuts (I say that as someone who’s way more nuts). He doesn’t act or react like your average person.
That’s because he’s not your average person. I don’t say this to apologize for what I’m about to describe but to explain the context. The same idiosyncrasies that make Joel a great producer also make him prone to what normal people might think of as ‘odd behavior’. Yeah, it probably is ‘odd behavior’ but it’s a package deal. It comes with that particular model of ‘Larger-Than-Life Movie Producer’. I don’t know many creative people who aren’t ‘strange’ in one way or another. Joel is just more ‘noticeably’ strange…
Joel flew across the border in a private jet. When it landed at Vancouver International Airport, Joel had to clear customs – same as everybody else. Except Joel had just travelled across an international border without bringing any sort of personal identification with him whatsoever.
Because Joel was driven most everywhere by people who worked for him, Joel never had to bother carrying a driver’s license. Though I’ve always assumed Joel could drive, I had never seen him behind the wheel of a car – or of any of his company’s 4X4’s.
And, because Joel was traveling private – where you didn’t have to present ID or your passport to check in – and because this was way before 9-11-2001 and things were significantly more lax around airplane travel – Joel was never asked prior to arriving in Canada to prove who he was.
Except, now that he WAS in Canada, Joel’s inability to prove who he was presented a gigantic problem. For him and for us.
Canadian Customs held on to Joel for hours. I’ve no doubt he insisted that they KNEW who he was cos EVERYBODY knew who he was. But they didn’t. And the longer they held Joel, the angrier he got. By the time they released him – in a completely different part of the airport than our transpo guy was expecting him – Joel was primed for battle. He tore through the airport like the Tasmanian Devil in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
By the time our transpo guys found Joel – and got him into one of our production vans – Joel was hitting nothing but high notes. The first place transpo took Joel was our studio facility at the GM Auto Plant.
Colleen, our production manager, had staffed the front office and nearly all the support crew with highly skilled women. They were not prepared for Joel when he blew through the office that morning.
I got a call from my assistant that I had better get the fuck over to the studio right fucking now – because literally the entire production staff was about to walk out the fucking door and quit.
By the time I reached the office, some of our staff were indeed on their way to the parking lot. I pleaded with them to go back inside, promising to make it up to them somehow (how exactly, I didn’t know – but somehow!)
Being too Canadian for their own good, everyone agreed to stay. For the moment. I jumped back into my car and raced back to location. I found Joel in the production trailer hanging with Gil – in a much better mood now that he’d spent his rage.
If I had the moment back, I would say something to Joel – respectfully, as I should have, to my boss. I would explain (and I believe he would get) that what just happened was not cool – certainly not for a producer of Joel’s caliber. It did not reflect well on him – or on us as a production unit. I would quietly remind him that no one – not even a movie producer – can treat people like that – especially when they work for us and we rely on their feeling respected to deliver their best. Being a good person down deep – Joel would have heard it.
Or he might have fired me.
THE DENNIS CONUNDRUM
It didn’t take long for Dennis’ daily revisions to his dialogue to ripple across the production in various ways. While Dennis’ improvs were getting him from entrance to exit, vital pieces of story information weren’t making it into the scenes.
Without those vital pieces of information, the story – such as it was – stopped making sense.
Next problem: Dennis’s schedule was wearing him out even before we got up to speed. Understandably – it was a brutal schedule. Every morning, he’d send his assistant to my office to ask – very nicely – if we could shoot Dennis out early so he could go back to the hotel and sleep. What that meant – in practical terms – was this: We’d shoot the ‘master’ and Dennis’ side of a scene first with full cast. Then, when we ‘turned around’ to shoot the ‘other side of the scene’ (the other characters interacting with Dennis), the rest of the cast would ‘act to’ the Script Supervisor (who was sitting by video village behind the camera).
And the script supervisor would be reading the lines that Dennis had improvised – rather than the lines the other actors had rehearsed to. Sometimes the scenes made sense and sometimes they, um, ‘strained’ to… The rest of the actors didn’t always get Dennis’ references and clever but obscure jokes. But they’re there in the movie just the same.
Then – because Dennis wasn’t ‘there’ for the rest of the cast, they began to resent him. And because he was improvising all his own dialogue, they began to feel disconnected from their own dialogue and characters because their dialogue didn’t always jibe with Dennis’ improvs; nothing really made sense.
Angie, meanwhile, was flying off to Seattle on her ‘weekends’ to be with Sly.
On her first southern jaunt, Angie told Sly about all the confusion surrounding the script. Sly leapt into action. He began rewriting Angie’s dialogue (dropping even more story details) – and directing her how to do it. Fortunately, that only happened once. A few weeks into production, Angie’s trips south stopped.
Now, I don’t know for a fact if anything was going on between Sly Stallone and anyone else on the ‘Assassins’ set in Seattle. I only know that, after the second weekend Angie flew south, we were contacted by someone in the ‘Assassins’ office asking if there was any way we could ‘hold on to Angie’ the next weekend – so that she couldn’t fly to Seattle.
As we told them – ‘No’ – because what would we DO with Angie instead? Take her on a long hike?
We heard a story from the Seattle set. I do not know if it is true (it could be bullshit). But it’s a hilarious story. Just to be safe, I’ll go a little vague on who it’s about.
An actor goes into his trailer, unaware that the wireless mic clipped to his wardrobe is still LIVE and BROADCASTING to the Sound Cart. Awaiting the actor in his trailer – a willing sexual partner who the actor instructs to ‘Stroke the shaft’ and ‘Cup the balls’.
As the sex continues in the actor’s trailer, more and more of the crew begin to crowd around the sound cart – to listen to the show. Before long, each ‘Stroke the shaft’ or ‘Cup the balls’ is getting bigger and bigger laughs.
The next morning, the actor arrives on set – and finds that everyone in the crew is wearing the same t-shirt that reads in big, bold RED letters: “Cup The Balls, Stroke The Shaft”.
Like I said – our people heard stories from their people. No idea what was true and what wasn’t.
By the third week of production, our ‘issues’ had ceased lurking beneath the surface.
The cast had fallen into two camps: The Dennis Miller Camp – which contained Dennis and his assistant – and Everyone Else. Corey was especially ticked off at Dennis.
I sat with Corey in his trailer one night listening to some of the music he’d made. It was raw output – some good, some self-indulgent, some crap, some a tweak or two away from genius. Corey wanted to get one of his songs onto Bordello’s soundtrack. I told him I would do what I could, but that decision was not one they offered to people at my pay grade.
The reason I had gone to Corey’s trailer was to massage a sensitive subject – his travels across the border. Because he’d had some legal run-ins related to drugs, each time Corey went from America to Canada or Canada to America, there was the possibility that he’d be held. I wanted Corey to promise me he’d be mindful of his situation and his responsibility to ‘be there’ for us.
Of course, Corey understood. It wasn’t a question. The movie business may have made him miserable inside but Corey’s a pro.
The subject of Dennis came up. The rest of the cast wanted him to be more respectful, Corey told me. They wanted him to stop going home early. I promised I’d try to do something to fix it. I lied.
Other problems: Indulging Dennis was slowing us down. We weren’t making our days the way we should have and that was costing us money. Bigger problem still: We were starting to doubt that the local Special Effects Makeup crew was up to the task of delivering believable special effects makeup. We were asking guys with lots of enthusiasm but limited experience doing what we needed them to do to deliver an A Game they didn’t have and couldn’t have.
We weren’t shooting the movie in Vancouver because it was the home of great special effects makeup talent. Keep in mind – we had slashed the special effects makeup budget to pay for Dennis. Throwing money at our problems was not an option. Spending the limited money we had wisely was – but knowing how to do that takes experience – and we had flown fifteen hundred miles north of ‘experience’.
One of the big set pieces that worried me was the ‘shoot-out’ in the bordello. Rafe (Dennis) breaks into the mortuary basement – water guns ‘blazing’ (his water guns are filled with holy water which, the conceit was, cooks vampire flesh). Lots of cast. Lots of extras. And Dennis.
Dennis, between takes, entertained. He was incredibly funny. And then he focused on one of our extras – a man who, though costumed, clearly had a very large penis. An unusually large penis actually – even flaccid.
I was laughing too hard at what Dennis was saying to actually hear him. But as funny as Dennis was, I felt awful for the poor extra – whose gigantic package had become the center of the known universe. Again – I do not blame Dennis for doing what a comedian does – with a subject that begged for his attention – and an audience that was eating it all up.
The onus was on the on-set producer to step forward and defend the extra – if gently and gracefully. Alas, ‘he’ didn’t.
The next big set-piece on the schedule came a few days later. Rafe enters the scene – a torture chamber set – leaps over a bannister, lands, picks up an axe and buries it in Lilith’s shoulder. Gil and Tom Priestly had devised a very clever shot – positioning the camera behind Lilith so that she’s in the extreme foreground) as Rafe lands, grabs the axe and strikes Lilith with it – cleaving her shoulder in two (in the extreme foreground).
So – lots of elements – a stunt, a locked off master for our special effect and then dialogue (including important information we need to justify the movie’s climax in the glass church several scenes later). If we screwed the pooch on any single element in the day’s work, we could take the whole damned lot of it and toss it into English Bay. Better yet – set fire to it all first.
Dennis’ assistant was waiting for me that morning when I walked into my office. As soon as she started with how tired Dennis was, I stopped her. Not today. Today just wasn’t possible – for all the reasons above – which I explained to her (pedantically, I’m sure).
“Dennis won’t be happy,” she said.
Something in me snapped. “I don’t care!” I said. I reiterated how complex the day’s work was (even more pedantically). If we screwed up any particular element the whole day was a waste.
She didn’t look convinced. “Okay…” she sang, heading out the door.
I stowed my exasperation and got on with my work – making sure (now that Dennis was ours for the day) that everything else went smoothly for Gil. Also on tap – another visit from Joel. This time (we were assured), Joel would have his passport with him – which he did.
Joel arrived at our studio space and headed immediately for Dennis’ trailer. Apparently, what happened there went something like this:
Joel: “Dennis – how are you?”
Dennis: “I’m tired, man, I’m really tired – I’m doing your movie and my show, and I’m exhausted but Katzy won’t shoot me out early so I can go back to the hotel and sleep.”
Joel: “What? You’re tired and Katzy won’t let you go back to the hotel and sleep? If you need to go back to the hotel and sleep, you go sleep. I’ll take care of Katzy.”
Joel headed inside to where we were shooting, scanning the faces, searching for mine. Finally, he found me – “Katz– Katz: C’mere, c’mere!”
There are moments – as you are called to answer them – that you know in your bones will leave bruises and permanent marks.
As I landed beside Joel, his voice went up a few dozen decibels – the better to be heard all over our noisy film set.
“I gotta tell ya something,” Joel Silver told me in a voice so loud people in KAMLOOPS could hear it, “Your people skills ARE SHIT!”
Joel went on for a bit but stopped, having realized that my eyes had glazed over like the Possum character’s in ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox’.
I had just experienced the most ironic moment of my life: Joel Silver, a man whose reputation as an obliterator of employees was so well known that movies like Swimming With Sharks were made about him, had just told ME that MY people skills were shit…
It took a moment to find my voice. I started to explain how complicated the day’s work was. “It doesn’t matter,” said Joel. “Actors are all assholes!” He described some of the soul-crushingly stupid things he had to do to keep Bruce Willis going on Die Hard.
Joel could see I still wasn’t ‘getting it’. He told another story to illustrate his point.
Michael Jackson, Joel began, was shooting a music video. The producers told the crew there was only one hard, fast rule: Do Not Talk To Michael. Period.
Michael sees a prop assistant wearing a cast on his broken arm. Michael approaches the prop assistant. Asks the prop assistant how his arm got broken. The prop assistant answers Michael – which the producers see. They fire the guy – for talking to Michael.
The next day, after hearing the prop assistant got fired, Michael shows up for work wearing a makeshift cast – just like the fired prop assistant’s – OUT OF SOLIDARITY.
Michael doesn’t go to the producers and demand that they rehire the prop assistant, he does this instead.
Joel arched his eyebrows at me. “See?”
Ummmmmmmm… I stare at Joel, defeated – still not getting it.
Joel drew closer to put the pieces back together. You have to do what your actors want, Joel insisted. If you don’t they’ll kill ya, they’ll fucking kill ya! I nodded, a sour knot of dread in my gut. Not only was Dennis gone for the day, but it had just become impossible for me to say ‘no’ to him ever again.
Of course, the day’s work got screwed up because Dennis wasn’t there. And, though we didn’t pitch it all aflame into English Bay, we might as well have…
Now here’s the punchline: The biggest irony wasn’t Joel Silver telling me my people skills were shit. It was that Joel was right.
On that day, over the course of that project – my people skills (whatever they had been before) had indeed become shit.
Retrospect has advantages – boy, does it. But it wouldn’t have been rocket science to have taken a moment – when Dennis’ assistant first came to me that day – and said, “You’re right – let me tell Dennis myself what’s happening today, so I can explain it to him.” Maybe Dennis would have gone along, maybe he wouldn’t have. I never gave him that chance.
As Joel correctly pointed out – my people skills were shit.
I’m not telling this story because now I feel awful about it. I’m telling it to describe how bullshit took over my life. I didn’t realize how right Joel was at the time. That there is bullshit.
Before we completely sail on from the Land of Shitty People Skills – midway through production, Sly broke up with Angie via long distance. On the one hand, it wasn’t surprising. On the other hand, she took it as badly as she had every right to.
To her credit, she showed up every day and was an absolute pro despite how torn up she was inside.
As we began to rally resources and planning for our climax in the glass church, we learned that the special effects makeup team was well behind. They tried to reassure us that they had the situation under control, but it was simply too complex for them. We had set them up to fail.
I got on the phone to Todd Masters. He agreed to come up and work with our Vancouver crew through the climax. If anyone could save us from ourselves and the mess we were in, it was Todd – at least where the special effects makeup was concerned.
With Todd working with us, I felt we had a fighting chance to get out of Vancouver alive – at least we had a shot at getting out of town with a movie that would cut together.
Our last big set piece before the climax was the confrontation between Rafe and Caleb (Corey, remember) at an abandoned power plant. Why an abandoned power plant? Because there WAS one outside of Vancouver (in Surrey) and it looked cool when we scouted it. So, we wrote it into the script.
Like anything else in the movie made sense?
All-Nighters are never fun. Your body and brain are forever at war: ‘No, no, no – we don’t start work now, dude, now’s when we crash!’
It had been four weeks on a movie no one liked making with a Canadian crew increasingly alienated from its American producers. The actors had all taken sides against the star. We were already over budget and in danger of falling behind schedule. We were a week away from shooting the movie’s climax and weren’t entirely sure we’d have special effects or special effects makeup that would rise to the occasion.
The night’s work began at ‘Magic Hour’ – sunset – when the light is… ‘Magic’. In Vancouver on that Height-Of- Summer Day the magic began around 10:30 pm – as the sun finally eased past the horizon. Because there’s so much water in the air, the sunsets in Vancouver on days when the cloud cover permits you to see them are beyond words.
We catch some great wide establishing shots of the power plant and Rafe (a stuntman actually) climbing over the high security fence that surrounds it. That done, we move inside for the rest of the night’s work.
First up – a fight scene that ultimately comes down to Rafe and Caleb – Dennis and Corey.
Coming into the fight choreography, Corey was pissed at Dennis for all the reasons we already knew. But Corey also was angry at Dennis because of things Dennis had said to him and about him. Personal things apparently. As we blocked the scene, Dennis continued to needle Corey. And, while they were choreographing the fight scene – AN ACTUAL FIGHT BROKE OUT.
It didn’t last long. Not more than a few errant swings – all by Corey. The awkwardness of it wasn’t helped by the crew cheering for Corey like he was Muhammed Ali (or Gretzky before he betrayed Canada and went to LA). No one leapt in to stop the fight. The fight choreographer – more by accident than design – blocked Corey’s two shots to Dennis’ face (thankfully!)
Slowly we went back to work – but with lead in our feet.
Falling behind schedule put us in a tough spot. We still had to shoot the movie’s climax in our glass church – Vancouver’s BC Place – and we had one night to do it now with no options if we screwed up (something we were getting good at).
And then we crashed headlong into ‘The Biggest Folly of The Whole Stupid Enterprise’: The ‘nighttime’ we were counting on in which to do ALL OUR WORK – shoot THE ENTIRE CLIMAX OF THE MOVIE – was going to last no more than three to three-and-a-half hours. Because it was July and we were in Vancouver – and when you’re that far north at that point in the summer? That’s how it is.
The sky simply did not become dark enough to shoot as night until well past 11 pm. After the first hints of sunrise appeared in the eastern sky around 2 a.m.? Shootable dark was good for no more than another 15 minutes depending on which way you were pointing the camera. We were shooting a horror movie – which relies on darkness – at a time and in a place where darkness was notoriously absent.
We simply hadn’t considered it.
Ironically – it was having the ‘glass church’ at BC Place for the climax that ‘sold us’ on Vancouver – that sent us on our way south thinking, ‘Ah well, at least the ending will be spectacular’.
‘Spectacular’ was about to fuck us completely.
We looked into hanging blacks to cover all that glass. Did I mention we were already over-budget?
We looked at rewriting the script. Unfortunately, we’d already done that. To cut it back any further would be pointless; our audience needs an ending to justify the time they spent with us.
We were going to have to dream big with the climax – get what we could – and hope like hell we could fix it in post.
There’s an old joke – “How do you make god laugh? Tell him your plans”. Time on a movie set works the same way. How do you guarantee you’ll need ten hours to get the job done? Have five in which to do it.
That five hours felt like five minutes.
I would compare the feeling to bailing water out of a rowboat that is going down no matter how fast you bail. And you know it. So do the sharks in the water.
Knowing we didn’t have an ending in the can slowed our pace even further. When our next weekend rolled around, I decided to head south and spend a few days with my wife. How perverse must things be that, in order to preserve your sanity, you have to escape to Los Angeles?
One of the perks I enjoyed was getting to travel first or business class. As I strode through Vancouver airport, I felt my mood lightening. The problems hadn’t gone away. For the moment, I just didn’t care about them.
I boarded the plane. Slipped into my first class seat and heaved the biggest sigh I’ve ever heaved in my life. The Flight Attendant smiled – sensing the relief that came with the sigh as she set a glass of red wine down on my tray table. She told me we’d be pushing back shortly. There was just one more first class passenger we were waiting on.
Good, I thought. I’d have company there in first class – as it was just me at that point.
And then the ‘other’ first class passenger entered. It was Angie. Doing exactly what I was doing – escaping to Los Angeles for her sanity.
Can I tell you – it is genuinely gratifying when a woman as beautiful as Angie Everheart greets you like a long-lost friend and hugs you – for all the world to see. And I was glad to see Angie. And getting to know her during those hours on the flight was genuinely rewarding – there was so much more to her than I realized.
But as the flight went on, and the subject turned to Sly – and how hurt Angie still felt – I cringed a little, feeling guilty for having kept Sly’s secret. She was torn, understandably, between missing the man she loved and reviling the shit who’d betrayed her. As Angie went on, a line from Sly’s first ‘big’ movie popped into my head like an earworm and wouldn’t go away. Lords of Flatbush. Stanley – Sly’s character – is arguing with his girlfriend. She threatens to reveal his big secret: “I swear, Stanley, I will tell everyone you cry after you come.”
Angie asked me what I was smiling at. “Happy to be heading home,” I said. But what I really was smiling at was the question that had popped into my head: Did Sly cry after he came?
Reaching LAX, Angie and I said good-bye, see ya ‘Monday’ (Saturday actually – our weekends were still screwy) and headed our separate ways.
We shot the movie’s opening sequence on the last day of principle photography – a series of shots of Prather (Phil Fondacaro’s character) and his weary crew trekking (it says in the script) to the furthest reaches of Tierra Del Fuego to find Lilith’s corpse.
We actually shot it just beside the snow-less Cypress ski slopes above West Vancouver. Even with the extended daylight (this time being to our advantage), we dragged and dragged – and barely got what we needed.
No one’s heart was in it. It was a hot day in Vancouver. It was sweaty. There were mosquitos. Everyone just wanted it to be over.
A few weeks before we shot our ‘martini’ (the last shot of the day – or the whole film), the question was raised – ‘Where will the wrap party be?’ The American producers weren’t asking – the Canadian crew was. The American producers knew well enough to not bother planning a wrap party since the crew was unlikely to show for it. Feelings were that bad.
Colleen threw a wrap party anyway – at her house. The Americans weren’t ‘not invited’ but the invitation to us wasn’t exactly ‘effusive’. It was still far kinder than we deserved. Determined to try and make the best of it, I went.
I think I know now what it must have been like to be a leper. With a bell on. Who’s otherwise naked. Some things, you really can’t put a good face on.
We packed up and headed home to LA, not having a finished movie in the can. The climax wasn’t there. It needed work. Same with the makeup special effects. Todd continued working with us to try and recreate – as economically as possible – a flaming Lilith Monster.
The goal was to be ready for release by Halloween 1995. It seemed do-able. But Universal didn’t seem in a hurry to finish Bordello. Eventually they bailed on Halloween. Our release date got pushed to August 1996.
August. The Doldrums of Summer. Where movie releases go to die.
But before we got there, we had reshoots to do. We spent a few days back at the Van Nuys Airport (where we’d shot ‘Demon Knight’) doing pickups with Dennis, Angie and Erika.
Finally, toward the end of the process, Bob Z came aboard to shepherd the movie its last few steps. Bob tightened the cut and came up with an idea for a scene that… except for one pickup – we absolutely did not shoot because it wasn’t in the script.
There’s a scene in the torture chamber where Lilith (Angie) confronts Katherine (Erika). Bob Z saw a way – using what we had (plus the pickup mentioned) to create the ‘illusion’ that Lilith and Katherine were engaging in a bit of lesbianism.
It’s not much of a scene – as scenes go – but, watching Bob Z more or less ‘invent’ a scene out of bits and pieces of what we had shot – massaging it and rearranging it – was like watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (well – in our case, the Sistine Chapel Bordello).
Halloween 1995 came and went. Crypt Life went on. We had a TV Movie to do for Fox and the last season of ‘Tales From The Crypt’ ahead of us. The malaise we developed in Vancouver endured and grew. So did our loss of purpose.