“Uhhh, let’s start with some … base?”
“Light or dark?”
“Well, I’ve been on a spaceship for fifty years, so I would really be pasty and tired looking, but I’m not gonna look like a vampire. Let’s go for ‘slightly tan.’”
Petia grabbed a container of base and applied it evenly. “Anything else?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, failing to recall the familiar pattern of application. “Let’s cover up those bags under the eyes, uh, add some … blush on the highlights, like the bridge of my nose and cheeks, and, uh … skip the eyeliner.”
Eventually, when Petia was done, I looked enough like my “movie self” to be satisfied, but I left the session terrified that I had omitted something elemental and would therefore wind up photographing like a rodeo clown.
My confidence was not boosted on the way out as I saw an early test of wigs and beards. In Josh Becker’s post-apocalyptic story, everyone has long hair and beards. That sounds reasonable, but not if the end results looked like the beards were on the heads and the wigs were on the faces. It’s safe to say that while Man with the Screaming Brain will never make anyone’s Top Ten Best Ever list, Alien Apocalypse easily had the worst hair and beard work since our Super-8mm movies.
Making Josh shoot first was the smartest thing I ever did. From his torturous, pioneering labors I was able to cherry-pick all my actors from his cast. Acting across from them in Alien Apocalypse, I found out who knew their lines, hit their marks and did well under pressure.
I was glad for the local Bulgarian actors. The Sci-Fi Channel alone was responsible for employing former Eastern Bloc actors by the truckload. It’s always amusing to hear actors from distant lands fake an American accent. The Kiwis did it pretty well for Hercules and Xena, but the Bulgarians had much less access to the English language and certainly no need to learn it, so it didn’t really work. This reality prompted Josh to warn me that he was going to have to replace 99 percent of their voices back in the States and that I should be careful not to overlap any of my dialogue. If I talked over their lines, I’d have to replace mine, too.
The sudden rush to shoot English-targeted material in Bulgaria and Romania caused a huge need for actors who could actually speak like Americans. Producers, trying to fill the need, scoured embassies, military bases – you name it. Jonas Talkington was one such man. A year before I worked with him, he was humping water to small Bulgarian villages in the Peace Corps. Now the son of a bitch had been in six movies in eighteen months – about the same pace John Wayne cranked out cheapo Republic Westerns in the thirties – just because he was already in Bulgaria and he was American.
Among other roles, Jonas played a police officer in Boogeyman 3, a SWAT leader in Mansquito and a radar man in Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil. By the time Josh and I were finished shooting in Bulgaria, Jonas could add “bounty hunter” and “Larry the sleazy businessman” to his résumé.
From a business point of view, Bulgaria was pretty easy to deal with. You didn’t need a work permit to ply your trade there – you just had to leave the country (crossing into, say, Serbia) and come back every thirty days. Known as the “Serbian U-Turn,” this was a clever way for authorities to keep tabs on someone from another country.
While I was able to skirt around the issues (since production took care of it for me), my poor wife, Ida, had to enter the demilitarized zone with scores of Gypsies and dodge angry Greek truck drivers to stay in the country past the initial thirty days. She gave me another “what for” speech when she got back that included words such as “reckless” more than once and phrases such as “never again” two or even three times.
The director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would have crapped their official pants if they saw some of the places we filmed. A long van ride to a rock quarry (good for simulating the surface of the moon) took us through what I dubbed “the Valley of Death.” I had seen black pollution from coal in Arkansas and yellow pollution from an industrial complex in Detroit, but Bulgaria was the first red polluter. The offender was a brick factory. It makes sense, right? Red bricks, red pollution. The density of the noxious particulates was fog-like and filled up an entire valley. It was a good lesson in what life would be like stateside without the costly “scrubbers” we impose on dirty industries.
Yea, though we walk through the Valley of Death, we shall fear no sequels.
I had to get all cozy with co-star Renée O’Connor two stories below the production office.
By the way, if I am unable to promote this book because I have since grown an extra head you’ll know why. The decision was to clear Soviet-era industrial equipment out of the way, throw dirt on the concrete floor, add some spindly pine trees, and voila – instant romantic forest.
If you survived the trip down the concrete steps to the set, everything else was cake. Railing was non-existent, and if you happened to slip your death would at least be quick because you would be impaled on a menacing tangle of rebar.
This large, underground “area” was creepy and weird. Now used to store oversized turbines, engines and God-knows-what in massive wooden crates, this was apparently the perfect place to stage a romantic forest getaway.
It might have been easier to accomplish this on the opposite side of the room, where the wall had crumbled away entirely, revealing a young forest growing directly out of a massive pile of rubble.
The interesting thing about filmmaking in Bulgaria was that they actually had a thriving film industry under communism. During pre-production, I saw the inside of a massive studio (unavailable to us – long story) that had been used for years. When communism crumbled, many key crew members left for work elsewhere and the whole thing sort of fell apart. As funky as our production was, it was nice to see a recently opened certified Kodak film laboratory return to Sofia – a concrete sign of film production taking hold again after almost twenty years.
Sometimes, making films in foreign lands is more trouble than it’s worth. To save money, you haul your ass halfway around the world to shoot in a place where English might as well be Mandarin Chinese – and yet we assume that a local crew would be hip to the type of film we’re making or what would seem “normal” to Americans.
This became quite evident on the first take of the “great slave rebellion.” Josh’s story line provided for a group of slaves held captive by giant bugs to break free and fight back with primitive weapons. In this case, the weapon was a bow and arrow. I learned how to shoot an arrow at camp in northern Michigan when I was ten. My mom was a Western movie freak, so I saw plenty of “arrow action.”
Thankfully, only actors with non-speaking roles were harmed during the volley of arrows.
That’s all well and good, but when my character, leader of the rebellion, stood up to shout, “Arrows!”, the Bulgarian extras let their arrows fly – in every direction. I think the injuries sustained were mostly “same team.” It turns out, the Bulgarian prop master, being Bulgarian, hadn’t seen as many Westerns as the average American and the extras hadn’t either, because nobody noticed that the key element – the notch in the back of the wooden arrow – was missing. Having an arrow firmly astride the bow is critical and it also explained why the arrows kept going willy-nilly until Josh discovered the glitch.
Alien Apocalypse, the first of my two-picture deal with the Sci-Fi Channel, ended after exactly eighteen days of shooting, and Man with the Screaming Brain began in earnest.
10
ATTACK OF THE SCREAMING BRAIN
Making B movies can be exhilarating. The pace is usually brisk and ideas, forced to the surface by a sheer lack of money, are kicked back and forth with the energy usually reserved for a World Cup soccer match.
Directors of these movies (referred to variously as genre, low-budget or schlock) are usually inexperienced, callow and unrealistic, but they are also enthusiastic, daring and indefatigable. The writers, typically working on their first screenplay, have something to prove, and
while they revel in their awkward dialogue and stupid (or missing) plot, you’ll occasionally find a spark of genius, fanned by simply not knowing what the rules are.
Fellow actors in these second-tier films are often very green with careers on the rise and it’s fun to watch them deliver every line of dialogue like it’s their last. Mostly, they’ll suck, but there is a certain truth in early work that isn’t always displayed by the other type of actor found in B movies (and I must insert myself into this category), who are very experienced, with careers more prone to gravity, and are excited just to remember dialogue. But, in the midst of the exhilaration, making B movies can also be a pain in the ass.
I was directing this second project for Sci-Fi and after witnessing the communication challenges while making Alien Apocalpyse I decided to go low tech. To improve clarity, I got my hands on a dry-erase board – that way, when words failed I could just draw the damn monkey wrench, or intersection or type of hat. It was a critical, battery-free, fallback device when translators hit an impasse.
The production office was a dead ringer for an abandoned building. In fact, the first floor was abandoned, so we worked on the second floor. The layout was essentially a long hallway with offices on either side, with a large room capping the end. I called this “the smoke pit.” The bare, square room was home of the transportation department, the production accountant, the production manager and the production secretary and a steady stream of production assistants. Everyone smoked. Windows, which were plentiful, were never open. I would plan my time there carefully, since I put a premium on the ability to breathe, only venturing into the smog for a quick cup of tea or a question. My office was down the hall. You could tell it was mine because the window was open.
Much of Man with the Screaming Brain takes place in and around a large American city. I was able to convince the Sci-Fi Channel to let me change the script to set the story in Bulgaria rather than try to fake Los Angeles with no money. It saved money and innumerable hassles, allowing me to point the camera wherever I wanted and shoot what we saw.
Blocked streets were something of an oddity in Bulgaria and I was informed pretty quickly that they “didn’t do that sort of thing.” Faced with the prospects of almost constant noise and interruption, I was determined to find a way to fake it all – to do this on some sort of backlot.
What we found blew me away.
When communism fell in the Soviet Union, it fell hard. Building projects, numbering in the thousands, ended abruptly in Bulgaria and other Soviet satellite states. Completed buildings became orphans and stood fallow. One such complex was a creaky military base. It was sprawling, with rows of buildings, streets, parking lots and alleys. Of course, you couldn’t see anything because nature had been reclaiming this urban environment for fifteen years. Trees, twenty feet tall, pierced the crumbling asphalt; parking lots and vines covered entire buildings.
Sensing the possibilities, we hired a team of Roma (my begging buddies) to “clean the place up.” Every layer the workers peeled back was a joy to behold – a new alley here, an undiscovered sidewalk there. Eventually, the city within a city was revealed and it saved our low-budget asses. Now we had a base of operations, and you can be sure it was named Bruce’s Backlot.
Finally, in a city that seemed chaotic, we had control – and we could tailor the production design around what we found. Bruce’s Backlot provided a sackful of locations without going anywhere: a hospital exterior (adding a fresh coat of paint only to the parts the camera saw), an operating room (a converted classroom), a chop shop (in a Quonset hut), the professor’s laboratory (once a beautiful auditorium with excellent acoustics), a bridal shop exterior and interior and even a “Gypsy town.”
And because we had keys to all the buildings, it was fun during prep to check out random rooms and artifact-hunt. Inside a dank storage facility, we found a pile of moldy Russian uniforms and the gifts of a lifetime for my army man brother, Don: a seemingly new gas mask and a chemical warfare book (in Russian), complete with a bullet hole through the middle of it. Don was delighted to get them, but I was a little nervous about getting those particular items through customs.
As much as I loved the control, Bruce’s Backlot couldn’t provide all of our locations. We had to venture into the actual city a couple of times and it was always amusing to do so. By this point in the story, my character has escaped from a laboratory after a massive brain operation and runs free in the city, scaring schoolchildren and trying to find out what the hell is going on.
Bear in mind, I have huge scars crossing my forehead and I’m running around in public sporting a disco shirt, Euro-fade blue jeans and white, clown-like shoes. And yet, in Bulgaria, nobody noticed. I would even hang out of the production van window at stoplights in full makeup, drooling and moaning to see what would happen. In the States, panicked mothers would be dialing 911 – in Bulgaria … nothing.
I concluded that under communism the average citizen simply didn’t get involved. You did your job and that was it. The “State” would take care of anything weird.
RUST IN PIECES
What comes with shooting in countries with far greater needs than those of an American exploitation film is what I call the Bulgarian Box of Chocolates, whereby you never really know, day to day, what you are going to get.
A key scene in the film involved a Vespa. I’ll spare you the narrative details of why it was critical, but the Vespa had to be pink, with streamers from the handlebars, and it had to be completely destroyed on film. At the time, I felt that my first meeting with the transportation department had gone well. Since only a small handful of crew members spoke English, my translator, Assia, was there as well. We discussed the alleged Vespa with Uri, the head of the transportation department.
“Now, look, Uri,” I remember saying. “I’m assuming that when I say ‘a Vespa’ we’re all talking about the same type of machine.”
I brought this up because of the array of odd vehicles I had seen on the Bulgarian roads, and I drew a crude picture on my dry-erase board.
“Of course,” Uri nodded in recognition. “No problem.”
My wife still thinks this is the sexiest picture of me ever taken.
“And I can paint it pink, right?”
“Of course,” Uri said, rolling his head from side to side in the Bulgarian way of expressing “understood.”
About a week later, I passed Uri in the hallway of the production office and I couldn’t help but follow up on the Vespa. Through Assia, who was continually at my side, I asked, “Hey, Uri, are we good on the Vespa?”
Uri thrust a thumb in the air and smiled confidently. “Of course.”
“And we can paint it pink and wreck it, right?”
Uri responded simply by rolling his head in that “way.”
A week after that, with no Vespa news, I began to get nervous – we were only a few days away from needing it. I insisted that Uri bring me an actual picture of the Vespa he intended to use. He did, in fact, produce a picture – of a blue Vespa.
“This is fine, Uri, but it’s blue. You can paint it pink, right?”
Through translation, Uri assured me again that it was not a problem.
“Okay,” I said, chewing on my lower lip. “We shoot with that in two days. Good luck.”
Forty-eight hours later, the second unit was preparing for the shot of the Vespa careening out of control, sans rider, and smashing into the side of a parked car. I was filming in a laboratory set across the street but peeked out when I had a chance. I was relieved to see the crew prepping a perfectly pink Vespa with cute girlie tassels fluttering from the handlebars.
A few minutes later, the ill-fated machine was rolled to its doom. Bouncing off the parked car, it smashed to the ground and let out a final gasp, courtesy of a cheesy spark effect. The crew applauded politely, as is usually the case after a “stunt” is performed, but as I glanced at Assia I was shocked to see tears streaming down her face. This was very unusual, because Assia had
always been calm and professional. I looked to Joel, the first assistant director.
“Joel, why is Assia crying?”
“Oh, that’s because it’s her Vespa,” he said, glancing at the smoldering wreck. “It was a gift from her father on her birthday. I guess they never told her they were going to wreck it.”
“But she is the fucking translator,” I fumed. “She was there. How could she not know?”
Joel shrugged. “Welcome to Bulgaria.” After an almost physical altercation with Uri, the sorry-ass “transportation” captain, I stepped away to cool down. The area I called Bruce’s Backlot had plenty of room to ruminate about my lot in life.
For Chrissakes, I’m a middle-aged man. I shouldn’t be dicking around Eastern Europe, wrecking the personal property of poor people just to make a movie about a jerk with a brain transplant! Grown men don’t glue prosthetic appliances to their faces and run around in silly costumes, fighting digital creatures that aren’t even there. Actors my age should be doing Shakespeare in the Park or at the very least headlining some innocuous Neil Simon comedy in Branson, Missouri.
No, instead, I was halfway around the world, fighting off a nasty infection, courtesy of a rusty hunk of un-oxidized metal.
The incident happened simply enough. On a Saturday, we got special access to a large, formerly “State-run” studio in order to capitalize on its size and Byzantine catwalk system. Chasing after a crazy Roma woman in a wedding dress through Sofia’s sewer system (it’s a weird movie, okay?), I nicked my right elbow on a rusty piece of metal caging. I didn’t think twice at the time and we shot everything else without incident.
A couple hours later, I couldn’t stop paying attention to my right elbow, which was now reddish and slightly inflamed. I didn’t “hit” the caging enough to make that kind of a lump, so I got the medic to look at it.
He wasn’t very pleased. “It’s infected, I think,” was the prognosis.
Hail to the Chin Page 9
