Hail to the Chin

by Bruce Campbell

  What was once intended to be a sarcastic advice book was now being plotted as a novel called Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, a silly Hollywood adventure with a schmo named Bruce Campbell at the core of it. The premise was a B movie actor finally gets into an A movie called Let’s Make Love and it all goes to hell in a handcart – a completely self-referential romp behind the curtain of Hollywood.

  The idea was to use real characters and place them in credible scenarios. In some parallel universe, for example, there could have been a movie called Let’s Make Love directed by Mike Nichols, starring Richard Gere and Renée Zellweger. It could have happened.

  Barry and I burned up a year and a half struggling with an angle, but once the story clicked I was able to wrap my head around it and take control. Now that I was dealing with fiction, it was easy to lay out this whacky tale in three acts, like a motion picture screenplay.

  In any story, there is a main conflict. In a three-act structure, the first act is the introduction of the problem, the second act confronts the problem and the final act serves to resolve the problem. It’s all about a character’s journey to overcome a physical challenge, an emotional change or a cabin full of undead friends.

  In the case of Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, my character, Foyl, is a wisecracking doorman who doles out love advice to Richard Gere. Hoping to prove himself worthy in such an A-list environment, “Bruce” embarks on a fantastic journey of romantic discovery to prepare for his role.

  Unfortunately for the fictitious production, my B movie, low-budget sensibilities infect the production and cause irreparable harm. A disgruntled studio executive, fired from Army of Darkness years before, is secretly behind the troubles, but he blames everything on Bruce. In a valiant Act Three, Bruce has to go undercover, infiltrate the studio, reveal the true culprit and clear his name – kind of like Mission: Impossible with cheap gags.

  EXPLICIT IMAGES

  With my first book, both a stylistic precedent and a personal preference were set by using a ton of photographs and images. For the autobiography, we could rely on actual archival photographs, clippings and memorabilia. For Make Love, we wanted the same density of images, but, because it was fiction, we had to make the images up from scratch – like all of them.

  In the manuscript, I referenced fake movies and had scenarios of lunching with Elizabeth Taylor, getting in a fistfight with Richard Gere, hanging out with Mike Nichols, being a doorman, et cetera. But, since none of it really happened, I had to recruit my old photographer buddy Mike Ditz to undertake a massive photo shoot. Together, we created the poses for the fake photographs, screen captures, posters and character gags that appeared throughout the book.

  I sent more than two hundred staged photos to my graphics guy and overall life coach, Craig “Kif” Sanborn (he added the life coach crap). Kif had been helping me with all my publishing projects over the years and this was his biggest test. A self-taught graphic designer, Kif had become much more advanced in the world of Photoshop, so he was able to take the reference photos and turn them into whatever we needed. Out of the 158 photographs, screenshots, posters, book covers and scans featured in Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, only four of them are images that actually existed.

  Make Love also made it to the New York Times bestseller list, which was a relief, because as my first “fictional” book, these were uncharted waters.

  For the audiobook, I decided to stick with the motion picture theme of the material and present the story in a radio play format – like a movie, without the picture. I love the controlled world of sound, so this was a fun, if epic, endeavor. I gathered up all the usual suspect actors, gave them each multiple roles and backed them up with movie-style sound effects to create a realistic environment.

  Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way was released, incongruously, as a comedy album as opposed to an “audiobook.” I made my deal with a record company, rather than an audiobook distributor, so it wound up in what I would consider a strange “catalogue.” If you can find it, I hope you enjoy listening to the most expensive audiobook ever produced.

  With two bestsellers, there was pressure for me to pump out a third book as soon as possible, but above all else, I was an actor and filmmaker. Like the salmon spawning, it was time to return to B movies and defend the world from alien termites and mad doctors!

  8

  THE BIG THAW

  As a young man growing up in Michigan during the cold war, I was taught that the Soviet Union was the original “Evil Empire.” I routinely participated in “duck and cover” nuclear attack drills during grade school. Even though I didn’t sense the significance of what was happening outside my suburban cocoon, it was still scary stuff and it bothered me that someone I didn’t even know might drop a big-ass bomb on me.

  And because kids weren’t allowed to fight in real combat yet, we held up our end with a mighty war of words, spouting ignorant, angry rhetoric at nobody in particular.

  “Hey, Don, see any commies today?” I’d ask my brother, hanging out in the woods behind our house.

  “Nope,” Don replied with a rueful shake of his flattopped head. “But those Russkies are gonna get it if I catch ’em creepin’ around.”

  Right or wrong, the only thing we allowed our midwestern selves to have in common with those vodka-swilling bastards was bad winters. Even by the time Don enlisted in the military, several decades after our wooded reconnaissance, Russia was still the number-one bad boy on the block. As a result, the big “thaw” didn’t happen in my family until Russia imploded in the late eighties.

  Tank Brothers: The Campbell boys prepare to defend against the Reds with our homemade tank.

  Through a fortuitous turn of events, I would live to face down my mortal enemy – not at a tense border standoff or as a result of some nuclear holocaust – but by making movies for the Sci-Fi Channel …

  To clarify, the gig was in Sofia, Bulgaria, a former Soviet satellite. But to me, Bulgaria, part of the former “Soviet Bloc,” was still a world apart, conjuring up medieval landscapes populated by stooped peasants, sporting hairy moles.

  “Why Bulgaria?” I asked Jeff, the producer who packaged and financed the two movies I was supposed to make.

  “Why?” he asked back in a tone one would use with a moron. “Do the math. Bulgarians make a hundred and ten dollars a month. Hard to compete with that. You want a Steadicam, don’t you?”

  To a producer in the low-budget movie business, that kind of cost savings is magic. To an actor, director or writer – you know, anyone who is actually making the movie – shooting a film in a strange land for the sole reason of saving money is a kind of madness that you either buy into or write about in a book because you can’t believe what you’ve experienced.

  For me, it was the latter.

  “Okay, so have you noticed that there are virtually no people of color in Bulgaria?”

  “Yeah. I noticed.”

  Jeff’s responses were always like those of a Mafia don – short and matter-of-fact.

  “Okay, and you noticed that my script is set in East L.A., where half of the characters are people of color? You did read the script, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. So? Shoot around it.”

  You can’t “shoot around” something that is inherent conceptually, but I wasn’t done stating the obvious.

  “Even if I could, have you noticed that all the street signs in Sofia [the city where we were to shoot] and all the giant billboards are in Cyrillic?”

  “… Cyrillic?”

  “Yeah, it’s the upside-down and backwards lettering that looks like Russian only it isn’t. It’s all gobbledygook.”

  “So?”

  I wish he would stop saying “So?”

  “Can we afford to change all the signs?”

  “No.”

  “And I’m assuming you’re gonna say the same thing about the cars.”

  “What about them? They’re a little weird looking. You slap on a U.S. license plate and away y
ou go.”

  “Jeff, you’ve been around this city – to the clubs anyway. I don’t know about you, but East L.A. doesn’t have 1980s-era Soviet SUVs driving around next to those two-cylinder East German cars with a shell made out of pressed paper.”

  There was a long pause as Jeff, in his don-like state, pondered my logic. “Do you want to make this movie or not?”

  At least he didn’t say “So?”

  The actual mission of going to Bulgaria was to make two movies. One was Man with the Screaming Brain, which I would also direct. The other was Humans in Chains (the original, more compelling title), an idea almost as old, which my good friend Josh Becker was to write and direct.

  I called Josh to explain the situation. “Hey, Josh, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “Sci-Fi wants two flicks. I’ve got one, but I need a second script, so let’s make Humans in Chains.”

  “Great, what’s the bad news?”

  “We’re shooting in Bulgaria and you’re going first.”

  ROAD WARRIORS

  The flight to Bulgaria from Medford, Oregon, was uneventful, with a short, seven-hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany. Josh Becker and I knew what we were getting into. We cut our teeth together in New Zealand on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess and Jack of All Trades and were used to the assimilation process of working in faraway lands – or so we thought.

  Bulgaria was something else. One of the most shocking things to experience once you get beyond the protective bilingual bubble of flight attendants and airport officials was the utter lack of English spoken in the country. Of the two hundred people claiming bags the rainy night Ida and I arrived, only one other person aside from us spoke English.

  “Mr. Camp-Bell?” a voice inquired behind me.

  I turned to face Ivan, the man who was appointed my driver/ translator/everyman. In time, I would regard Ivan as all that and more – he was my savior. Ivan wasn’t the pasty, shaven-headed soccer hooligan type I assumed populated Eastern Europe. Ivan had black hair, half-hidden but intense green eyes and a dark complexion. There were few times when a cigarette didn’t dangle from his mouth – or almost any other Bulgarian’s.

  The official Bulgarian symbol of health and longevity.

  I remember peeking through the window of a quaint little cafeteria. There were twenty-five neatly arranged tables, each adorned with an ashtray. Bulgaria in 2004 did not play the “smoking section” or “smoke-free” game – far from it. An indelible image at a popular restaurant was a father eating dinner with his wife and two small kids, keeping a lit cigarette at the table, taking puffs between bites as if it were a side dish of mashed peas.

  I spent the first three days driving around Sofia, Bulgaria, with my mouth mostly hanging open in disbelief. I had read the history books about how Russia invaded so-and-so and it all kind of rolled off, but to see the aftermath of nearly forty years of Russian domination was a sociologically unpleasant adjustment.

  In Sofia alone, it was impossible to count the number of partially completed building projects of every scope and variety. The halt in construction wasn’t from a housing collapse – communism itself had collapsed. After 1989, state-owned property in Bulgaria lost its meaning, so nobody knew who owned anything anymore or who paid for what. Abandoned construction projects dotted the landscape, rife with anomalies – a brand-new, five-hundred-seat movie theater (stadium-style, with reclining seats), where I showed the cast and crew Spider-Man II, was constructed next door to a hulking shell of a building that had lain fallow for fifteen years.

  Cultural oddities abounded. The use – or lack thereof – of seat belts confounded me. In a fifteen-person passenger van scouting locations, I was the only person who wore a seat belt. Maybe Driver’s Education in Bulgaria didn’t include screenings of the vomit-inducing Signal 13 or Death on the Highway, where you could see in bloody, you-are-there detail, how seat belts save lives. Ivan chuckled to himself every time I fastened my seat belt – and each time, I would challenge his logic.

  “Why do you wear seat belts?” Ivan asked.

  “Because we’re in a large, heavy object hurling down the road at twice the posted speed limit. I mean, you’re a great driver, Ivan, but physics are physics.”

  “Oh yes?” he countered. “A friend of mine was in car accident. He did not wear his seat belt and was thrown free from car and lived. His friend, who wore seat belt, was killed.”

  “Okay,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “I’ll give you the one-in-fifteen-thousand chance of that happening, but statistics are on my side.”

  I enjoyed watching the elegance of Ivan spotting a police car, reaching over and buckling his seat belt until the car passed, then deftly unsnapping it.

  I guess it’s a cliché to bemoan crooked cops in foreign countries, but I suppose if you look at the reasons behind it the reality becomes more sympathetic. Police in Bulgaria made scarcely more than Joe Blow citizen, which was Jack Shit, but they had a weapon the average citizen didn’t possess: the ability to extort.

  Ivan was pulled over one day by an officer waving a red stick with a flat round top, painted with a symbol. When we stopped, Ivan got out of the car and walked around the corner with the police officer to “deal with the situation.” A few minutes later, I learned that Ivan had refused to play ball with the officer.

  The claim was that Ivan was talking on his cell phone while driving, a transgression worth about ten bucks in cash – to the cop. If the “fine” was not paid and the cop had to write an actual ticket, the fee would become exorbitant. Normally, Bulgarians would roll their eyes, give the guy half of what he asked for and be on their way. Ivan was a different kind of guy who wasn’t enamored with what he considered robbery. His conversation went something like this:

  “I’m not paying it.”

  “Are you crazy?” the cop asked, incredulous. “Do you know how much the ticket is if you send it in?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I work for a company that will pay it. Write me the ticket. I’m not giving you anything.”

  The cop had no other choice than to write up the ticket and let us go. I have a sneaking suspicion that somehow, some way, Ivan made the ticket “go away.”

  BETTER THAN COMMUNISM

  If you like to drink, stop by Bulgaria sometime. If you like cheap vodka, book your flight right now. It is no state secret that the Russians like their vodka. The Bulgarians, although rightfully separate beings, perhaps by way of almost half a century of influence, developed their own taste for it – and the stuff was readily available. Unlike the United States, where moral codes and doctor warnings keep us from drinking twenty-four hours a day, a culture without those restrictions sees the world through different cocktail glasses. As a result, it was no big deal to get your hands on a large bottle of vodka Sunday morning at 9:00 on almost any street corner for about seven U.S. dollars.

  Personally, I enjoyed the Bulgarian beer. Most of it, even the crappy stuff, was better than our staples in the United States. My friend Josh and I particularly enjoyed the brand Kamenitza. It was so “off-brand,” the restaurants wouldn’t carry it, but the stuff was a premium lager by any standards. After three or four of them we coined the ad slogan: “Kamenitza – it’s better than communism!”

  Aside from the negative effects of alcohol, what I witnessed was a country in emergence. Under communism, you were not allowed to gather in groups and there were no such places as restaurants or cafés because, God forbid, original thoughts and ideas might get exchanged! Now, Sofia was a virtual explosion of places to eat, some of them first-rate, and it was exciting to witness.

  One of the many pluses of Sofia was that Ida and I felt really safe. Ida walked home alone several times from events well after midnight and she never felt threatened or in danger. Under communism, if you got caught stealing, raping or killing you disappeared, so nobody dared to get away with anything.

  With emerging capit
alism came a demand for service-oriented, “quick grab” vocations – like driving a cab. In Sofia, it was easy to catch a cab but not so easy to get where you were going. After a few solid misfires, I realized that to get around town I had to adapt. Ivan translated the address of my apartment into Cyrillic and had it laminated on a little card. That way, languages be damned, I never even had to talk to a given cab driver – just hand over the card and that would be that.

  It was nice to have a plan, but I wouldn’t call it foolproof. After I confidently handed over my address card, the driver would rattle off a litany of questions in Bulgarian. My response would be in the form of a shrug, which would cause him to shrug back and we would begin the journey. If all seemed hopeless, I’d hop out, throw the guy a few leva (the official currency), jump in another cab, get closer, then repeat the process as many times as it took to either get home or recognize one of the many oversized monuments to Soviet glory near my apartment. The towering statue of a peasant woman clutching both a child and a rifle usually bailed me out.

  Capitalism meant the arrival of goods previously unheard of in Bulgaria – like VCRs. Technopolis was a brand-new retailer for all things electronic. It was positively Best Buy in size and scope, but strolling the aisles for living-on-location gadgets I noticed a lack of high-tech consumers.

  “Why is it so dead in this store, Ivan?” I asked.

  “Simple. You have to pay cash. They don’t take credit cards.”

  I wondered if American stores would be as empty if we only bought items we could afford and actually had the cash in our pockets. What a concept.

  Tourism was beginning to pick up and Sofia was a hot spot for Eurotrash looking to have a cheap, good time. With the influx of foreigners, including American filmmakers, local panhandlers had new targets unfamiliar with their ways. The leading charity seekers were the Gypsies, or Roma. Personally, I have no issue with Roma or any other ethnic group, but getting the stump of a baby’s missing arm shoved in my face took some getting used to.