Against All Odds: My Story

by Norris, Chuck

  While it was a relief to know that I could relax a bit and no longer had to be constantly preparing for the next big tournament, being unemployed was disconcerting. What was I going to do with the rest of my life?

  Over dinner one night Steve McQueen verbalized the tough question, the answer to which led me down an entirely new career path. “What do you plan to do,” Steve asked, “now that you have sold off all your karate schools, and you are no longer competing?”

  “I'm not really sure, Steve.”

  “Why don't you try acting?” he asked me.

  “You've got to be kidding!” I said. “What makes you think I could be an actor?”

  Steve looked at me as though he were looking deep into my heart and mind. “Being an actor is easy,” he said. “But being a successful actor is another story. It requires a presence on the screen, a presence that I think you have, but only the camera can determine that. The camera either likes you, or it doesn't, but you won't know if you don't try. I strongly suggest you give it a try.”

  For the next few months, I continued teaching martial arts, but I couldn't get Steve's comment out of my mind. I did a little research and quickly discovered that at that time about sixteen thousand actors in Hollywood were struggling to survive with an average income of $3,000 a year.

  When I mentioned that statistic to Steve during another lesson, he grinned. “Remember that philosophy of yours that you always stress to students: set goals, visualize the results of those goals, and then be determined to succeed by overcoming any obstacles in the way. You've been preaching that to me for two years, and now you're saying there's something you can't do?”

  “I didn't say I couldn't do it,” I told Steve. “I'm just saying the odds are pretty incredible, and, well, … stop grinning because I'm going to give it my best shot!”

  Steve laughed. “I knew you would.”

  As I was driving home, I thought about the awesome task I was considering. I was embarking on a new career with absolutely no experience at thirty-four years of age, with a wife and two children to support. Then I remembered the story of the bumblebee. Aerodynamically it is impossible for the bumblebee to fly. The body is too big for the small size of the wings, but apparently no one told the bumblebee that, so he flies! That's pretty much the story of setting goals. Nothing is impossible unless you believe it is. On the other hand, if you believe in God and in yourself, all things are possible!

  The next day I checked around for an acting school nearby. I quickly discovered that acting schools are expensive! But as an honorably discharged member of the Air Force, the government would pay for part of my education. In the Yellow Pages, I saw that the famous acting teacher, Estelle Harmon, accepted students on the GI bill, so I enrolled in her classes. It was a full-time school with classes held six to eight hours a day. We studied introduction to voice, reading comprehension, and stage movement, as well as acting.

  Most of the other students had studied acting in high school or college or had some other formal training. I was a novice, the oldest student in the class, and I felt like a white belt again, but I was determined to learn as much as I could.

  At my first session Estelle asked me to read a scene with an actress in which we played a husband and wife having an argument. I was rigid with fear. After class Estelle took me aside and said, “For an athlete, you're the stiffest person I have ever seen.”

  “I've never been so scared in my life, Estelle. I had no idea how difficult acting could be!”

  One of the keys to successful acting that Estelle taught her students was to evoke powerful emotions from our past, drawing on them to recreate similar emotions in a scene. She encouraged us to practice this principle in our rehearsals.

  During one session Estelle made each student get up in front of the class to sing and pantomime a song. As I waited for my turn, I sat petrified trying to think of a song I knew. When it was my turn, I walked to the front of the class and was about to admit that I couldn't recall the lyrics to any songs, when suddenly, I remembered an incident from my past. I began singing “Dear Hearts and Gentle People,” the song my mom taught me as a child.

  I pretended that I was singing as I was taking off my clothes and stepping into the shower. I have no idea how my voice sounded, but I do remember that when I finished, I felt a great sense of accomplishment. This was my first experience with drawing upon personal experiences to make a scene come alive, and I realized that it actually worked!

  As a regular part of class, Estelle required the students to play out scenes, and then the other students would critique their peers. When Estelle asked me to critique my fellow students, I always tried to begin my comments by saying something positive, then offering any suggestions for improvement, followed by a final positive affirmation. I would never tell one of my fellow students that his or her performance was wrong. I felt that although there may be a better way of acting out a scene, there was never a wrong way. I always tried to tell the students what I liked about their performances. Sometimes I'd say, “If it were me, I might have tried it this way,” but I'd never condemn a student or say anyone had done a part wrong. Most of the students did something similar with me when I was being critiqued.

  One day I played a scene in which I thought I had performed rather well. As usual Estelle chose a student to critique my performance. For some reason the guy tore into me. He shredded everything I had done in the scene, concluding with several caustic remarks. “You're the worst actor I've ever seen. What makes you think you can ever be an actor anyhow?” he railed.

  I could feel my blood boiling and rushing to my face as the guy continued to skewer me in front of Estelle and all the other students. I was embarrassed, and I was getting angry. “Who are you to tell me how to act?” I retorted. “You haven't been here any longer than I have. You're not an experienced actor.”

  I turned to Estelle, and said, “Estelle, I'll take criticism from you because you know what you're talking about. But I'm not going to take it from this guy.” I walked out of acting class and never went back although I still recall some of Estelle's acting lessons with great gratitude.

  With my limited acting experience, I decided to go out on some auditions for parts in television shows and movies. My first audition was for a bit part in a movie. Imagine my surprise when I walked in to the audition and saw more than forty other fellows waiting to try out for one part! I recognized several of the actors and thought, What chance do I have against these guys? Needless to say, I didn't get the part.

  As a martial arts teacher, I always tried to set a positive example for my students. Now, as a fledgling actor, in my imagination that was the type of character I hoped to play one day. I am quiet and reserved by nature, but I have strong principles. I wanted to develop a character with similar attitudes and values, a man who used his karate ability to fight against injustice.

  Once I had the right mental image, the next question was, how am I going to get the chance to do it? Since the death of Bruce Lee, film producers no longer felt that karate movies would be profitable. I realized that if I waited for a producer to come knocking on my door, I'd be waiting a long time. There was only one thing to do. I would make my own break and come up with my own idea for a film. Looking back, I'm amazed at my audacity. To think that with the thousands of writers, producers, and other creative people competing in Hollywood, I could develop an idea for a film? It was ludicrous!

  But ideas are funny little things. They only work if you do! So I went to work, trying to bring my ideas to fruition.

  Although I had ceased competing on a professional level, I continued to teach private students, keeping in contact with many of my former students, and more importantly, keeping myself in tip-top physical condition. After a workout one night, I mentioned to a few of my black belts that I needed an idea for a karate movie. John Robertson, one of my first black belts, spoke up. He said he had an idea for a story about the Black Tigers, an elite squadron of special commandoes in Viet
nam. “We'll call it Good Guys Wear Black,” he said.

  John and I spent a few days writing an outline for a story about the character of John T. Booker, a Vietnam veteran whose old war buddies are being killed off one by one. Booker's job was to get to the bottom of the mystery. Neither of us had ever written a screenplay, nor did we have the money to hire a writer. We finally convinced Joe Fraley, a friend who was a professional writer, to write the script on speculation, meaning he would be paid only if it sold. Joe wrote a short script from our outline and brought it back to me. I loved it! I honestly thought it could work, so I set about taking the next step—one of the most difficult, I was soon to discover—finding some investors to put up enough money to make the film.

  My reputation as a world karate champion opened many doors, but it also caused many doors to slam in my face just as easily. “Karate movies are over,” I heard again and again. I met with producer after producer, but they all had preconceptions about me. They thought of me as an athletic star who couldn't do anything but fight. Because I had few acting credentials, I was unable to convince them that I could offer more to a movie than my karate skills. I'd had a lot of experience selling karate lessons to prospective students, but I'd had little experience selling myself as an actor, and what little I'd had was far from impressive. At the end of each meeting, the producers inevitably asked, “Why do you think this movie will make money?”

  I'd stammer around, trying to persuade the producers, but I never had an adequate answer to their bottom-line question. I had visualized some but not all of the obstacles that I might face. Although I received one rejection after another, I was not discouraged, but I was disheartened. And I was nearing a desperation point.

  Like any other profession there are many good ways of getting started in the film industry—studying theater in college, going to acting school, doing internships with reputable filmmakers, working in the industry and watching for a break—but taking any acting job that comes along can be counterproductive and possibly even dangerous. For me it nearly stalled my career before it got started.

  When Lo Wei, a Chinese director, asked me to play a role in a low-budget karate movie called Yellow-Faced Tiger that he was making in San Francisco, I said, “Sure, why not?” Lo Wei said the movie would be shown only in Asia. I didn't care; I needed the money. Dan Ivan, a friend of mine, told me he had a role in it as well, so Dan and I drove to San Francisco together.

  When we showed up on the set, Lo Wei told me I was to play the Mafia boss of San Francisco and wear a hat and smoke a cigar. I told him I didn't smoke. That didn't matter to him. They bought me a cheap suit and a stogie that was about a foot long. My big scene called for me to fight and get beaten up by the star of the movie. Oh, well! I did the movie, got a little more acting experience, and collected my check.

  One night while we were in San Francisco, Dianne and I decided to take the kids out to a movie. While looking at the film listings in the paper, I noticed an ad for a film called The Student Teachers. I remembered that a couple of years earlier I had received a call from an independent film company producing a film with that title. They wanted me to bring some of my students to a park in Inglewood, California, where I would conduct a karate class with two of the stars.

  The producers told me that the movie was about a couple of teachers who were unhappy with the teaching methods in public schools, so they broke off with the system and created a different learning environment. It all sounded innocent enough, so I brought my two young sons, my brother Aaron, and about twenty other students to Inglewood. We spent a balmy afternoon shooting a scene in which I taught the two stars and my students karate moves on the grass. That was it. I never heard anything else about it. But now the movie was playing in San Francisco.

  I suggested to Dianne that we all go see the movie because Mike and Eric might enjoy seeing themselves on the screen, and I, too, was curious as to how the movie had turned out. The theater was in a rundown, tough section of the city. When we arrived, Dianne said, “I'm not going to a movie here.”

  “Oh, Dianne, don't worry,” I said. “Let's just go in and watch our part, and then we'll leave.” Dianne reluctantly agreed.

  The inside of the theater was worse than the outside. Drab and dreary looking, with worn, tattered, sticky seats, one could easily imagine all sorts of sleaze and evil going on within these walls. Only a handful of people were in the audience when we took our seats. We sat back and waited for the start of the feature. The title credits had barely rolled, when we sat back up straight in our seats. The opening scene of the film was of a naked woman lying on a bed!

  Dianne and I covered the boys' eyes. “Let's get out of here,” Dianne said.

  By then the naked woman was off the screen, so I said, “Let's wait a few minutes longer. It can't get any worse.”

  But it did! The movie was replete with sex scenes, most of which were a hard “R,” and we were constantly hiding the kids' eyes. Finally our scene came on. There I was filling the screen in a gigantic close-up. Oh no, I thought, the one time I don't want to be on screen, and here I am, bigger than life!

  In 1976, I was asked by another small independent production company to star in Breaker! Breaker!, a movie about a trucker who uses his citizen's band radio and the help of other truckers to thwart a corrupt judge who controls a town with an unfair speed trap. The title comes from the phrase used by truckers when they called for help on their CB radios.

  I thought Breaker! Breaker! might be a good breakout role for me as an actor. Equally important, I was to be paid $10,000 for the role, and I needed the money. Dianne and I were just barely meeting our monthly bills with my income from teaching private students and seminars. Although I was the star of the film, the promotional material didn't even mention me, and it never played in Los Angeles. In order to see it, Dianne and I had to fly to San Francisco with my friend, Larry Morales, who was also in the film. There were only two other people in the audience that Monday night. Somehow the lack of response from the public took the excitement out of our movie debut. The first week the film didn't do much business. But when word got out about the great karate fight scenes in the flick, attendance increased. The picture eventually did fairly well at the box office, but because my name was hardly mentioned in the advertising, it did nothing for my acting career.

  For three years I knocked on doors all over Hollywood, carrying the script of Good Guys Wear Black. One day I told my accountant about the problems I was having getting the script made into a movie. He said he had a client named Alan Bodoh who was a producer and might be interested. He gave me Alan's phone number. I was all set to call, but when I found out that Alan was just a young man in his twenties, I lost my enthusiasm. What could a young kid like that know about raising money and producing films?

  Months later, while visiting Larry Morales in his machine shop, I told him that I was at my wit's end. I had pitched the project to every producer who would see me. Then I remembered Alan Bodoh and told Larry about him. “I'll call him for you,” Larry said. He got Alan's secretary on the telephone and told her he had a friend with a script that he wanted her boss to read.

  “Send it in,” the secretary said.

  “No way,” countered Larry. “I know how that works. I want your boss to have dinner with my friend, and then he can have the script.”

  “That won't be possible,” the secretary said.

  Larry persisted. “Ask your boss if he knows anything about Chuck Norris, the world karate champion.”

  The secretary buzzed Alan, who had heard of me. He arranged to meet me for dinner that following evening at a Mexican restaurant in Hollywood. Larry, Dianne, and I went to dinner with Alan and his wife. Alan looked even younger than he was, but he was a very down-to-earth fellow. We all hit it off immediately. Alan had already produced two successful, relatively low-budget films including The Great Smokey Roadblock with Henry Fonda, and he had lots of great stories.

  When the dinner check came, I pic
ked it up. I looked at the total and gulped hard. I suddenly realized that I didn't have enough cash to pay the bill, and I didn't have a credit card. I motioned to Larry to join me in the restroom. “Larry, I don't have enough money to cover the bill!” I said frantically. “We're trying to impress this guy! We can't stick him with the check. How much money do you have on you?” Larry pulled out his wallet and dumped the contents in my hands. Together we had just enough to cover the bill and even a small tip.

  Alan dropped Larry, Dianne, and me off at my home around midnight. We had enjoyed such a great evening with Alan and his wife that I had almost forgotten about the script. I got out of the car and began saying good-bye. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” I said.

  “Well, thanks, but what about the script?” Alan asked.

  “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The script!” I hurried into the house and retrieved a copy of Good Guys Wear Black for Alan. I handed it to him. “Read it when you get the chance,” I said, “and let me know what you think.”

  “I will,” Alan assured me. “Thanks again for dinner.”

  Four hours later, in the middle of the night, my telephone rang. It was Alan Bodoh calling. “I've read the script, and I love it!” he said. “I'm going to try to produce it for you. I want to present it to my investors who are businessmen in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.” I was so excited I couldn't get back to sleep the rest of the night!

  Despite his enthusiasm Alan found it impossible to convince his investors to finance the film. They were mostly local lawyers, doctors, and other professional business types, and none of them had ever heard of me. “No, we can't see gambling a million dollars on someone we don't even know.”

  Alan called me to say he was sorry.

  “Alan, do you think you could get the investors together one more time so I could talk to them?” I asked.