Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 2

by Carnell, Thom

  How were you brought on board for the first Crow film?

  I was called by Ed Pressman in late 1991 to do a page-one rewrite (i.e., a new draft from scratch) when a first draft and revisions by John Shirley failed to help Pressman secure a studio or production funds.

  I know that over the course of filming The Crow you became friends with Brandon Lee. Can you take us through your version of the accident and the subsequent emotional upheaval that occurred as a result of it?

  It’s time to stop carping on the accident, which, as I answer this question, was four years ago. People still sidle up to you in that faux-intimate way and purr, “So what really happened..?” What really happened was that there was a hideous accident on-set. I was there and saw it happen, and there’s not a day that passes in which it doesn’t cross my mind. The most emotional moment I can recall came not when Brandon died, not even at the memorial service later in California, but on the flight back from North Carolina after production was suspended. Tabloid reporters were sneaking onto the backlot and nailing crew members in restaurants. There were a couple of fistfights. It was a siege atmosphere. Some of us stayed in town a few days longer than others because immediately after the accident it was like the evacuation of Saigon. But we finally left. I was flying back with Alex McDowell, the production designer, and Ken Arlidge, one of the cameramen; both friends. We’re all sunk into our seats, just wishing the plane would never touch down, that it would keep going until it got someplace where there were no people, no “entertainment magazines,” no bullshit on the news. And before the in-flight movie, trailers come on, and sure enough, one of the previews is for Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. And the whole first class cabin comes alive with: “Isn’t that the guy who just got killed? Wasn’t he murdered? Wasn’t he cursed?” I hope, in your life, you never feel the way we all felt at that moment. What we saw around us was not curiosity or sympathy, but a rat-eyed lust for gossip, tongue-clucking disapproval and the kind of ambient smugness that says people who have the arrogance to make movies richly deserve whatever disaster befalls them. I pretty much gave up funerals and wakes after Brandon’s service, for reasons having mostly to do with the ghouls who show up to be seen grieving, the ‘coffin riders.’ There are better ways to honor the dead. I’ve said this before: Movies are like war in that war can be hell. You’re frequently in some far-flung location where you have to bring in all your own supplies and keep from going nuts. Sometimes there is glory, sometimes there are casualties. But unless you’ve been there and done it, you have no idea what it is like no matter how many dumb movie magazines you read.

  I know a lot of changes had to occur in the film after Brandon’s death, what were some of them and do you agree with the direction the film ultimately went in?

  It was the same direction it had been going when principal photography started, only now it gained the resonance of Brandon’s death. Shitcanning the entire film would have been more cost-effective to the money guys, and Alex Proyas did not want to continue until a couple of the actors encouraged the idea that the only thing more depressing than burying Brandon would be to bury Brandon and the movie, which had a chance of standing as legacy. Whether you like the movie or not is irrelevant; put yourself in our position. Once the decision was made to complete the film, three quarters of our original crew put themselves on hold or worked for next to nothing just to be there. Going back gained an almost spiritual urgency. And the final shot of the production was the giant, flaming Crow outline, which seemed like a nice closure until we realized we had to reshoot the disinterment scene from point of view inside the grave. That chilled our freakin’ self-satisfied closure, but good. I knew a lot of people would go to see the film out of morbid nosiness. But that’s an opening weekend sort of thing; it burns sometimes hot, always fast. I had no idea people would obsessively come back and watch it over and over. There are, today, at least 20 Crow websites. Think of some of the other films that came out in 1994 – are people still talking about Schindler’s List, or True Lies, or Forrest Gump? Good or bad, they were forgotten as soon as they won some trophies and got shoved aside to make room for the next blockbuster, and…and here people are still talking about The Crow. I miss little things – looks, lines, or explanations for why some strange-seeming things were there. In the first cut we had, some things were better. I’ll give you an example of a microscopic one: in the pawnshop scene when Eric says, “I’m looking for something in an engagement ring,” we originally had the camera on Brandon when he said, “Gold.” He had the perfect expression; it was a good moment. But in the interests of tightening, we now see a reaction shot of Gideon when Eric says “gold,” and the moment is missed, and the scene gains nothing apart from being speedier by a quarter second. The Reznor song is rhythmed to the action better in the first cut. The bad guys are more individualized. You get to see Funboy totally out of his mind on drugs, basing like a demon, then licking the needle he uses to shoot up Darla. The heart-to-heart scene in Albrecht’s apartment had room to breathe. The infamous liquor store robbery by 12 year olds was intact. While we were shooting that scene, the news let us know that a couple of 13 years olds had tried to boost, at gunpoint, a convenience market somewhere in New England. The rough cut, incidentally, was temp-tracked to This Mortal Coil and Gabriel’s score to The Last Temptation of Christ, in case you hadn’t guessed. One of the most obviously reworked scenes surprisingly works very well – the scene where Sarah speaks to the empty apartment, which was originally dialogue between her and Eric as Eric sits at the fireplace burning all the remnants of his past life. We just removed Eric’s lines and played it straight for the most part. It’s a bit more obscure, but it works a hundred times better.

  What is your opinion of the franchisement that has occurred with The Crow?

  Ed Pressman took on The Crow as a franchise from the beginning; he said so in a dozen interviews. Brandon was signed to star in three Crow movies. So all this mawkish card-shuffling about what the “mythology” really means is bullshit. Now it’s more about selling collector’s cards, and Slurpee cups, and tchotchkes nobody with a brain needs. None of this junk would move without the emotional connection to Brandon. That’s commerce. This is, after all, America. So far, I’ve turned down writing two Crow sequels and a TV show. That’s my choice. The only way I would ever have been willing to tackle a sequel would be if Alex had returned to direct one; then, sure, I’d throw in with him. But I don’t have to; he doesn’t have to. I’ve since written two other features for Alex.

  They are?

  Final drafts on Dial M For Monster (by Proyas and Brendan Young), a really grotesque comedy featuring aliens and Mexican wrestlers, and Book of Dreams (by Proyas), a surreal pastiche of dream worlds presented as a declassified documentary. Dreams is partially shot already.

  What, in your opinion, happened between your script and the finished product of Leatherface?

  We lost a key producer in the very early stages of the project. Jeff Burr, the director, had to swing in on a vine at the eleventh hour with no prep and no down time from his previous feature. And Jeff was not part of the rewrite process – so, with the replacement producer, you have three plans all pulling against each other.

  Were you happy with the way the film came out?

  In that I got a full production gig on the first feature screenplay I ever wrote, I’m happy that it came out at all. Does the movie represent the script? Not really. But I’m past indicting anybody; basically no one is completely happy with the final version as released. The workprint has enjoyed some popularity as a bootleg item, but it’s no closer to the script than the release version. Think of it as a foothold; you try to do better with each job, until the next script and the movie made from it ultimately converge. Insofar as that arc, I am getting a little closer to satisfaction on each new project. On the other hand, I heard that the draft I wrote of Freddy vs. Jason for New Line – as the fifth writer in a chain of eight or nine so far – has been redrafted into a straight comedy.
In some cases, you just accept the credit and move on.

  Given that Hollywood is such a difficult environment to work in and one that is prone to the raping of any writer’s vision, what lures you to continue to work there?

  There’s no place on Earth you can get paid better just for making shit up. I’ve heard Hollywood is a sewer, a destroyer of talent, all my life and it just isn’t true. You have to understand ground rules, guilds, what titles mean and how expert liars can function without malice. You have to learn how not to take certain spiky things personally, and be reasonably user-friendly to people who consider themselves “more normal” than you…but what wage jobs exist in the world where you don’t feel you’ve blown opportunities, could have done better, or have to put up with assholes now and then? The dynamics of the deal are like armor you wear into battle. If you return from the field alive, you win. It’s the Filmmaking-is-Hell scenario again. Some writers are conscientious objectors. Some are just grunts. Some are like Patton. The people who still want to believe in what Michael Crichton calls “the ‘They Killed My Baby’ tradition of writerly whining” in regard to the movie industry should read the book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne, which is the real deal about the ups and downs of spending eight years to make a movie – not the envious, fantasy jerkoff that is the mainstay of movie crapzines, which are written by outsiders, for outsiders. The bottom line of working in Hollywood is that the pleasure is equal to the pain, and both can be considerable, but neither is guaranteed. Movies are the artistic medium of this century that reaches the greatest audience, so there’s your motivation. And believe it or don’t, but it is possible to use the system as much as the system uses you, and if you understand that, then the whole process can be fantastic.

  Out of curiosity, what do you consider to be examples of great filmmaking? What are your Top Ten films?

  I don’t have a list, but a pretty good barometer of a “top” film is any film that profoundly changes the way films are done after it. Take Alien as a perfect example – it changed everything. I knew everything there was to know about that film before it came out. I’d read every draft of the script and interviewed a lot of the principal cast and crew in 1978. And the first time I saw it complete and assembled, it still blew me away… and pretenders are still trying to imitate it nearly 20 years later. Its progenitor was really Creature From the Black Lagoon, a movie I could watch a couple of times a year for the rest of my life, and probably will. Some recent odds and ends: My favorite horror movie of 1994 was The Road to Wellville; I’ve seen it maybe 20 times. Of 1996, Fargo, which I saw on Academy Award night (in 1996), which is the best night of the year to go to the movies – it’s the only way you can avoid all the Oscar bullshit. Seven – or Se7en – impressed me. In these days of politically correct sweetness and light, we need more dark movies. I just wish they’d kept the original ending but the reason the ending got changed was thanks to focus group screening polls, which have outlived their usefulness by a couple of decades at least. You spend a year or two on a film and some nitwit who got a free pass has the power to change your ending? Fuck that. Cronenberg’s Crash is a great example of a movie that’s important even if it is flawed. It’s important because it is a film chock-full of automobile accidents and sex – neither of which are designed to appeal to the prurient interests of a 17-year-old. And it is important because it stands as an artistic work in spite of the Family Values Nazis and their insectile ratings systems.

  Is it possible for one of your stories or books to ever get a fair treatment on film?

  If it worked for Michael Crichton and J.G. Ballard, it can happen for me, sure. Has it? It hasn’t really had a chance yet. I don’t write my fiction while selling the movie rights in my head; nor do I particularly write film work for any other medium. Keep in mind that all of my produced film work has been as a hired gun for material that did not originate with me. Chainsaw III was a sequel. The Crow was based on a comic book. The Showtime Outer Limits I wrote was an original, but it was severely compromised before the first draft was even finished, then butchered by a hack, so by the time it actually got near a camera, it was a crippled, hopeless thing. I’m working on two features right now for which all the basic ingredients were supplied. My job is to mix the ingredients palatably. To turn one-liners into characters, and log lines into a coherent story. I hope. As for specs, who cares? As Larry Cohen said, “Every asshole in Hollywood has got a spec script in his back pocket.” Really titanic assholes have one in each back pocket. Nothing counts unless you get paid for it. As ground rules go, it’s a pretty simple proposition, really.

  Would you ever want to see The Shaft or The Kill Riff be made into a motion picture? Would you want to write the script for them?

  The Shaft might be fun to distill. I’m afraid The Kill Riff would date at lightspeed no matter what the prevailing musical fashion is. By the time a movie could be written, shot and released, it’d look as outmoded as Phantom of the Paradise does now.

  Who would your choice of directors be?

  Val Lewton, but unfortunately, he’s dead. I’m kidding. Not about the dead part. Never mind…

  Do you think that anthologies are a good way for readers to be introduced to new writers?

  Not a good way, but absolutely the best way. That’s why I made sure there were a couple of “first sales” in Silver Scream. Mark Alan Arnold was an editor, but nobody knew him as a writer until “Pilgrims to the Cathedral of Sleaze,” which title I forced him to shorten. Tobe Hooper got a kick out of getting book credit. Mick Garris’ first published short story sale was to Silver Scream – “A Life in the Cinema,” the story he fondly calls “the cocksucking zombie baby story.” Anyone who thinks Mick is a creampuff, based on some of his film work, should read his short fiction, which is hard to find, but which will knock your dick in the dirt.

  Do you ever get tired of being referred to as the “Father of Splatterpunk?”

  Nope. It’s out of my hands. I think the curse of life is that you don’t get to choose the thing that makes you immortal – if anything at all. Your worst novel becomes a popular classic. Your most mediocre song is a hit. Nobody uses your chewiest quotes, and the dumbest thing you ever said gets used as a bloc excerpt. The worst photo of you ever taken is the most reprinted. I just shudder to think what the Mother of Splatterpunk might be like. Think of the children!

  In the realm of horror fiction, who do you think is out there plying their craft and doing it well? Who do you read?

  Sometimes I get so fed up I say, “I don’t read horror anymore,” which isn’t strictly true, and is bad, besides, to dismiss it that way is to automatically corral it into the kind of cut-and-dried “genre” I hate. It’s still the best when it comes at you unheralded, without the “horror” label plastered all over it, because it has a better chance to surprise you. There’s a plot twist a third of the way through John Farris’ Sacrifice that knocked me flat and left me gasping; there’s another key revelation of that sort in Wildwood. I like Farris. Sometimes he seems to be the only adult out there writing scary stories for the mainstream. I just discovered William Browning Spencer. I enjoy Thomas Ligotti and Michael Blumlein. I devoured the new, “lost” Shirley Jackson collection, and am prodigiously reading every volume of North Atlantic’s ten-volume Theodore Sturgeon omnibus as the books come out. I have a decided taste for the erotically-charged stuff produced by the Reform School Riot Grrls of horror – where’s my list? – Poppy Brite, Christa Faust, Kathe Koja, Lucy Taylor, Caitlin Kiernan, Nancy Kilpatrick in her “Amarantha Knight” incarnation (the fact that Christa is my wife has absolutely no bearing on my appreciation of her fiction). If Richard Christian Matheson ever finishes his second collection, I’ll read it – probably in an afternoon. Joe Lansdale is an automatic must-read, although I could live quite happily in the absence of any more Hap and Leonard novels, which is what he’s been concentrating on recently. Doug Winter needs to finish his damned debut novel so I can read i
t. Tim Lucas, who wrote Throat Sprockets, has just finished his second novel, titled The Only Criminal. I’m there. I wish Rod Whitaker – Trevanian – would write another novel; it’s been nearly 214 years. I don’t know if he died or just switched pseudonyms again. It’s not just the writers you read now, but the writers you consistently return to. Robert Bloch taught an important lesson when he told me that late in life he’d decided not to keep books in his house unless he had read them twice. We must not forget Fritz Leiber, or for that matter, Joseph Payne Brennan, or Gerald Kersh. Right now, in England, Stephen Jones is assembling Karl Edward Wagner’s final collection under the title Exorcism & Ecstasies. Karl’s first collection, In a Lonely Place, was one of those books that just picked me up and shook me. And that’s just in so-called “horror.” Good thing you didn’t ask me about anything else scary…

  What made you decide to embark on such a daunting task as writing your Outer Limits Companion?

  I had no choice. It was either go all the way…or don’t go.

  How long did that book take to pull together?

  It was over ten years from first interview to publication of the first edition, which was in 1986. To get to the book version, the publishing world had to be lubed up with an eight-part series in Twilight Zone Magazine. Then I redid a “bullet version” of the TZ piece for people who could no longer find the book. And I am just now putting the finishing touches on a heavily-revised second edition, for GNP/ Crescendo. This is not the old book with a surplus catch-up chapter tacked on. Every page has added text and corrections. New photos. New layout. Larger format. Higher price. I just hope I can get it out the door this year.