The only problem with my new tractor was that I had no clue how to use it, so I did what people from the Midwest do: I called Sears.
Fooled into thinking it was just a “general service call,” Sears would send out a technician to take a look at my tractor. Once he was there, I deftly weaseled the operating instructions out of him.
“Hey,” I asked, “is this the lever for the front loader thing?”
“Yeah,” the Sears tech would explain, “but make sure the loader is engaged when you use it.”
“Of course! And, now, this thing is the uh…”
“Oh, that’s the electrohydraulic hitch control,” the tech said, getting suspicious. “You ever drive this before?”
“Sure, plenty of times!” I would assure him.
You may be wondering why I didn’t just admit I had bought a tractor without the slightest idea of how to make it work. Well, when you’re best known for mounting a chainsaw on your hand and building “deathcoasters” people just assume you’re an expert in landscaping equipment.
Over the course of three different “service visits,” I figured out how to operate my tractor. It wasn’t all that different from a riding mower and I finally worked up the courage to blade the driveway all by my big-boy self.
At first, I was primarily concerned with making it look nice and flat. The problem was that flat roads provided absolutely nowhere for rain to go. Water just pooled into puddles and turned my flat driveway into a craggy, uneven mess.
After a few tries and the advice of a veteran blader, I finally discovered what road builders have probably known since ancient Rome: Roads need to be slightly higher in the middle. Eureka! Now, rain had somewhere to go and my hard work wouldn’t wash away immediately. With that simple innovation, I went from having to blade my road weekly to only having to do it two or three times a year.
I knew I had finally nailed it when we were hosting a party for the valley residents during our lavender harvest. Anticipating a parade of guests, I gave the driveway a fresh John Deere makeover.
During the festivities, Scotty, a big, tough rancher, moseyed over to me and asked, “Who did your driveway, son?”
Actor Tractor.
“Uh, I did, sir,” not sure what his response would be.
Scotty put a grizzled hand on my shoulder and smiled appreciatively. “That’s a hell of a blade job, son.”
And with that, my initiation to Oregon was complete.
4
A HUNK OF BUBBA LOVE
“So, Don, are you gonna see it? Are you gonna see the dick?” I asked.
“No,” Don Coscarelli replied. “It’s implied.”
Both the question and the answer were important, because in Don’s new movie, Bubba Ho-Tep, the story revolved around a sixty-eight-year-old Elvis Presley in an East Texas rest home who was dying from cancer – on his penis.
I was asking Don because in considering the role of Elvis in this whacked-out story by Joe R. Lansdale I wanted to know how far Don was going to go. Was he going John Waters far? Pink Flamingos far? If so, the movie would become something you couldn’t take back – it would be knocking on the door of tastelessness, and although I’ve been in unrated movies and plenty of edgy stuff, that wouldn’t be something I was looking for.
Once I had cleared that major hurdle, the next question concerned my litmus test for low-budget productions: “How long is the shoot?”
I didn’t ask that because I was lazy and hoped for a mercifully short shooting schedule so I could golf more. I asked because in the movies-without-budgets world I tend to inhabit, shooting length can be the difference between “doable” and “no fuckin’ way.” If Don was hoping to bang this thing out in two or three weeks, like a lot of ultra-low-budget filmmakers, I knew it would be time to walk away, Ray.
“Six weeks,” Don said, reassuringly. “We gotta get this right.”
That was all I needed to hear. “Great!” I exclaimed. “I’m in.”
I knew of Don Coscarelli, but I didn’t really know him before shooting Bubba Ho-Tep. Don, like we did with Evil Dead, started in the world of nano-budget genre movies – very handmade stuff – and his first effort, Phantasm, became a cult classic.
I’ve always had respect for people who go their own way creatively and Don fit the bill quite nicely. Joe Lansdale, by my way of thinking, also had an enviable career writing pretty much anything he damn well pleased. When not penning mostly dark, homespun material, Joe is a martial arts expert, dog lover and small-town Texas man who has mostly shunned mainstream Hollywood. My kind of guy.
The elements were in place. Now I had to get ready to play The King. Although the Elvis character in this story was a geriatric sixty-eight, a few flashbacks featured Elvis performing live, late in his career. Terrified that I actually had to get onstage and emulate a performer – whose live acts were astonishing – I tracked down an Elvis impersonator and scheduled a session ASAP.
My “session” with – let’s go with “Ken” – wasn’t as long and exhausting as you might expect. In fact, it was rather short, mostly because Ken gave up on me halfway through. It all started innocently enough, with Ken regaling me about the time he wore a jumpsuit that Elvis actually wore.
“I was doin’ this charity gig, see – on the Vegas Strip. I called up the jumpsuit company that made the outfits for Elvis. There’s only one company in the whole country that makes ’em. But dig this,” Ken continued, using vernacular like The King. “If they made a jumpsuit for you, they owned it. You had to give it back. Even Elvis.”
“Sounds draconian,” I remarked, wondering where his story was going.
“So, anyway, I asked if I could wear an actual suit Elvis wore for this charity deal and they say, ‘Okay.’ Me and the King were similar in size, so it fit me like a glove.”
I still wasn’t sure if the story was cool or creepy.
“So, there I was, baby, doing my thing onstage, and I started to sweat…”
Boy, did Elvis sweat. Watch the Hawaii comeback concert on YouTube and you’ll know what I mean. To put it bluntly, Elvis sweated like a fat pig. With a crappy diet and lots of pharmaceuticals, I can only imagine the heinous fluids emanating from those famous pores.
“Now,” Ken explained, “because of all the sequins on the jumpsuits, they couldn’t really wash those things; they could only steam ’em – so ol’ Elvis, he would get a little ripe, see? To cover up the smell of B.O., or whatnot, Elvis would use Brut. He’d dump the shit all over himself.”
By this time, I was pretty sure Ken’s story was gonna turn creepy. I was right.
“Well, I’m doin’ my thing onstage and I start to heat up real good,” Ken elaborated, his eyes widening at the magical memory. “Next thing I know, the smell of Brut (albeit thirty years old) starts to come out of the suit. It was the same smell as The King. I knew it was legit. I was channeling Elvis Damn Presley. Best show I ever gave.”
Desperate to avoid becoming entwined in another slightly homoerotic story, I cheerily clapped my hands together. “Great story, Ken. Hey, wanna try some moves?”
Ken ran me through the particulars of stage posture, microphone-holding techniques and general hip-thrusting gyrations, but it didn’t last long. After about five minutes of watching me attempting to thrust my pelvis, Ken threw up his hands. He had seen enough.
“Look, man, you’re never gonna get it. Let’s call it quits.”
As far as research goes, I was on my own.
By the time I became aware of Elvis Aaron Presley, he was a washed-up, bloated ghost of his former self – touring mindlessly to support his over-the-top lifestyle and avoid dealing with the ruins of his life. But Elvis, in his heyday, was something. Frank Sinatra was the first singer to drive teenagers insane, but nobody drove them as insane as Elvis.
Bubba Ho-Tep, even with a ridiculous plot (an aging Elvis teams up with a black man – who thinks he’s JFK – to save a rest home from a soul-sucking mummy), had a sweet core. Deep inside all the
crazy antics, there was an engaging, redemptive story lurking. Bubba was ultimately a quiet meditation about aging and usefulness. This is what I connected with and tried to get across in the characterization.
I watched a lot of footage of Elvis. YouTube is the modern actor’s research library. Wanna see Elvis’ last concert? It’s there. Wanna see his “posse,” drunk and crying in an interview a decade after Elvis’ passing? It’s there. My takeaway was that Elvis had it all and lost it all – fame, fortune, relevance – and it pushed him over the edge. Ultimately, he was a supremely talented, not fully formed human being who found out too soon that the dream of riches and fame could easily become a nightmare.
In addition to “learning” how Elvis moved, talked and sang, I had to try to look like him. Thankfully, my Elvis was mostly sixty-eight years old in the movie, so we were in uncharted territory. To sell the main illusion of Elvis, two things were critical – the hair and the almost ever-present sunglasses.
“We could use your actual hair,” makeup wiz Melanie Tooker explained, “but if we use a wig, we can match it perfectly.” She was right. Even without doing anything else, the wig got me halfway home. Elvis’ sunglasses took it the rest of the way. There is something so iconic about them, you just start talking like Elvis the second you put them on.
Don Coscarelli got in touch with the aforementioned jumpsuit manufacturer, which amazingly still made elaborate outfits – and still wanted them back when we were done! For the flick, I ended up with three bitchin’ outfits: white, black and a vibrant blue. What I wouldn’t give to have those suckers hanging in my closet now. Drunken karaoke nights would never be the same.
Some locations don’t need a lot of work to be camera ready. This ancient WW II era veterans’ facility in Downey, California, was one such place. Used to house countless vets after a devastating war, then abandoned due to neglect and consolidation, the sprawling compound already had dank, interminable hallways, peeling lead-based paint and banks of un-flushable toilets. The smell alone made the location all too real.
Shooting Bubba wasn’t much different from other low-budget movies, but after a brief chat with the boom man, the person responsible for recording every word out of my mouth, it dawned on me how low-budget this movie actually was.
“So, Mike, you excited to work on this whacky flick?” I asked, using my most pleasant, first-day-of-filming vocal inflections.
“I sure am,” Mike said, fairly beaming. “This is the first movie I ever worked on.”
I went pale. “So, Mike, you’ve never held a boom pole in your hand before?”
“Nope. But I’m sure excited to learn.”
I’m not usually an asshole on set, but I raised a finger and pointed it at Mike’s face. It wasn’t a threatening gesture, but it wasn’t a friendly one either.
Years ago, the American public was asked to vote for the official Elvis postage stamp.
“Now, you listen to me, Mike. I don’t like looping. You don’t even know what that means, so I’ll tell you: Looping is what actors do if they haven’t been recorded properly, you understand?”
I have found that performances always suffer in the looping process. Granted, with wind machines and talkative directors there are cases where you can’t avoid replacing some dialogue, but to me looping means we failed on set.
“We can’t fail, Mike,” I concluded sternly. “You have to record every one of my lines like your life depended on it.” I said it with a smile, but Mike knew, deep down, that I was not kidding. Mercifully, Mike did a great job and 99 percent of my dialogue was recorded perfectly.
Ossie Davis was a revelation. By the time he worked on Bubba, he was already eighty-three years old. This was to be his second-to-last performance. You could tell that Ossie was a guy who didn’t have bad habits. He didn’t smoke; it didn’t seem like he was a drinker; his mind was still very sharp. Ossie was a good steward of his instrument.
The first time I met him was on set.
“Ossie, I know why I’m in this movie, but what are you doing in this movie?”
“When I got the script, I showed it to my grandkids,” he explained. “They said, ‘Oh, Grandpa, you got to do this!’”
Apparently, the youngsters were fans enough of Evil Dead to recommend the gig. We were grateful to have him. Ossie lent a huge amount of overall credibility to the film, just by being there. An actor of tremendous poise and charm, he “classed up the joint.” Lest we forget, Ossie’s first film was around 1945. He has since been honored with lifetime achievement awards, Kennedy Center awards, a Grammy, a daytime Emmy. I could go on. Most substantially, he was an ardent civil rights activist, who delivered the eulogy of Malcolm X. Mr. Ossie Davis was an impressive man.
When you shoot a horror movie, a lot of things will never change – creepy locations, working at night, fake fog, fake blood, prosthetic makeup and, inevitably, monsters. In those respects, Bubba Ho-Tep was no different, and the shoot plodded along. Horror movies don’t “race,” they plod, because all of the aforementioned elements take more time to do.
Don Coscarelli was slow and methodical in his prep and execution. He’s a meticulous director and ultimately I appreciated that. I say “ultimately” because while I tend to be more “ready to go” in my approach to filmmaking, Don tends to be more ponderous in his. This was an adjustment for me, being inherently impatient, but once I could see what Don was up to, how he was crafting these scenes, I calmed down and we got into a good rhythm. Ossie and the rest of the cast – including Phantasm’s Reggie Bannister, who did a great cameo – brought their best under the low-budget conditions and we walked away feeling like we had at least done something a little different.
Don, being the truly independent filmmaker that he is, basically disappeared for a year to edit the film. I admire Don for his dogged determination to make movies by hand. Every frustration I ever had with him was always erased by knowing how much personal time, effort and money he puts into each of his projects.
Don finally emerged and showed us the final product. I thought Bubba was funny, unique and strangely touching. I was very happy with the results and very happy to help promote it.
Big-budget motion pictures have big PR machines behind them. Bubba Ho-Tep had Don Coscarelli. In an impressive feat of personal tenacity, Don began the horrifying process of self-distribution – fronting the money for making film prints, placing local ads, booking theaters and then collecting. On Evil Dead, we had much of the same independent spirit, but thankfully, we never had to self-distribute. The concept of dealing with bookers and theater owners, notorious for taking forever to pay, makes me shudder.
On my end, I agreed to appear at some local L.A. theater screenings and ended up introducing the film in half a dozen cities – all to very good reception. The midnight screening at the Toronto Film Festival will always remain with me as a treasured experience. The audience response was almost rapturous. Joe Lansdale’s very original story walked a fine line between absurdity and pathos and it really connected with audiences.
Bubba worked its way into numerous film festivals and the reviews were crazy good. Eventually, after a respectable run in theaters, Don made a deal with iconic MGM to handle the DVD and ancillary rights.
Just recently, now fifteen years after its initial release, I taped an interview for the updated, Blu-ray release. It’s always great when a film you worked on decades ago remains popular enough to be reissued and preserved for generations to come. At the end of the day, that’s really all us entertainment types can hope for – relevance.
Hey, it’s Ossie Davis!
One of my favorite, lasting images of Bubba Ho-Tep was in Nacogdoches, Texas, home to writer Joe Lansdale. The local theater was showing Bubba and I was in town for a Q&A with Joe after the show. As I walked up to the theater, I could see two long lines of patrons, each snaking out the door and into the adjacent parking lot. One line was waiting for Bubba and the other line was for Mel Gibson’s wildly successful Passion of the Chr
ist. I enjoyed contrasting the type of people in each line. While visually very different (Bubba fans had more tattoos), I guess you could say each group shared strong “passion.”
As I walked by, a Bubba fan spotted me. “Hey, look!” he shouted, gesturing to dueling lines of devotees. “We’re all here to see The King!”
T.C.B.
5
HELLO, NEIGHBOR!
The perception of Californians is that they are all a bunch of wackos, living the bohemian life, but after I met my new neighbors north of the border Los Angeles seemed dull as dust in comparison.
The day Ida and I moved in, I was checking to see which mailbox was ours and I ran into my first neighbor – Cowboy Kenny. He was tall, wiry, and had a slightly nasal twang in his voice.
“I’m just an old cowboy,” he said, extending a weathered hand, “but I got me a younger wife!”
Kenny worked for Sam and Melinda – a former food broker and lawyer, respectively. Ten years ago, they cashed in the chips for a Black Angus cow-calf operation in the middle of nowhere. Naturally. Kenny and his “younger wife” Gidget stayed in separate ranch quarters with two teenage kids from different marriages.
Later that same afternoon, a mid-eighties Lincoln Continental chugged up our long, steep driveway. Gidget jumped out, cradling a tall can of Bud in one hand and Dude, a terrier, in the other.
“Howdy, I’m Gidget,” she said, shaking my hand like she was running for office. “Now, I know that this is your first day here – we saw the moving van – and you’re not going to have anything ready to eat, so Kenny and me want you to come over for dinner tonight. We’re right across the road.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Then I guess we’re coming to dinner, Gidget.”
That night, Cowboy Kenny squinted at me from the end of the rustic dinner table.
“I unnerstand you played a cowboy in a TV show.”
Hail to the Chin Page 4
