If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor (10 page)

On a school day, Christy wouldn't have given me the time of day, but the chance to be in a "movie" made it cool enough for her to hang out with us. It also helped that her boyfriend, Tim Quill, was the lead bad guy.

Prom came and went and I never even knew it -- that's how disconnected I was from the dating scene. Still, it didn't keep me from trying to get the attention of women, and I would do anything to get it -- even streaking. Yes, I too was suckered into that lame seventies fad.

One night, neighbor Judy Feldman was home alone babysitting her little sister. The elements were ripe for a "streak," so Scott Tyler and I ran through her backyard, buck-ass naked, and bounced on her trampoline while she looked out the rear window. To prove that we did it, Mike Ditz came with camera in hand to document the entire thing. Streaking did nothing to further my relationship with Judy, but she never looked at me that same way after that. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.. .

The smartest thing I ever did was drop Typing 101 for Radio Speech. From the minute I sat among thirty other typists, most of whom were able to type already, I knew this wasn't a place I
needed
to be. I paid the price eventually, of course, in writing this book -- hunting and pecking my way from start to finish.

The other fringe benefit of this brilliant decision was that it put me in another class with Sam -- did I say that was a good thing?

Sam was seated behind me in Radio Speech and one of his favorite pastimes was to inflict torture without getting caught. He'd lie in wait, until Mr. Moll called on me to answer a question. As I began to speak, Sam would place a sharpened pencil into the square of my back and apply pressure, testing to see how long I could speak normally. Afterward, when I threatened to stab his eyes out, he'd come out with, "What? I tried to help you," utterly convinced of his innocence.

This one-sided abuse became the basis of our professional relationship. Bear in mind, this is the same guy who went on to direct Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner.

Sam was a master at planting insidious little seeds. He took Modern European History from Chester Guilmet one period before me -- all the time he needed to tell the serious teacher, "Bruce Campbell does a
great
impersonation of you."

As I settled into my seat in Mr. Guilmet's room, the first words out of his mouth were, "Mr. Campbell, I'd like to see you after class..."

Cut to me, red-faced, well after the bell, as Mr. Guilmet reamed me out for a crime I didn't commit. The scary thing about all of this was that Sam didn't do this because he hated me or anything -- he did this type of thing to people he
liked.
I knew right then that he was an agent of the dark side.

As an outgrowth of Radio Speech, Sam and I teamed up for a live show that aired during Friday morning home room. Our "broadcast" reached an entire school and we enjoyed a captive audience -- students couldn't have turned us off if they wanted to.

The show chronicled the misadventures of Captain Nemo and his band of pirates. Sam played the captain and I was Wood-Eye, his trusty First Mate. Enlisting the services of our Radio Speech teacher, Mr. Moll, as the announcer was a great way to keep our show on the air for the better part of a year.

Another sideline of being a Radio Speech student was providing music for the lunchroom study hall. Acid-rock lovers patronized the place and Kiss was always high on the request list. With influences more along the lines of The Carpenters, I wasn't about to play ear-bleed music, so I'd play a Kiss song, then place a thumb on the turntable and drag it to a slow death.

THE
PLAY
IS THE THING

From the day I enrolled in high school, I wanted desperately to be a part of the plays, but getting in wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. Theater, at least in these circles, was very clique-oriented, and if you weren't in drama class, you weren't gonna get in any plays -- it was as simple as that.

This became obvious when Josh Becker, John Cameron and I auditioned for the spring musical,
Promises, Promises.
If you've ever heard me sing, you know what my chances were. Fortunately, Josh and John weren't any better. John sang the Beatles song,
Help,
and he needed plenty of it. Josh charged through
Gigi
until Mr. Moll cut him off halfway through with, "That's enough!"

My audition song was
Love --
you know, the one that spelled out the word: "L is for the way you look at me..." Mr. Moll attempted to cut me off around the letter O, but I was undaunted and finished the song. It didn't make any difference because I didn't get the part I was after... or
any
part. The following fall, I took drama class and it changed everything. Mr. Moll got a better sense of what I could and could not do, and it eventually led to a role as a crazed Russian in the farce,
See How They Run.
At the risk of perpetuating a cliche, I must admit that seeing my name on the casting notice outside the drama classroom was a huge rush.

I didn't have much hope for the musical that following spring, but membership had its privileges and I snagged a nondescript role in the chorus of
Funny Girl.
That was fine with me, because my dancing partner was Toni Wylen, one of the most beautiful girls in school. I can't say that we fell madly in love, but it was enough to know that she
had
to dance with me.

Senior year, our little troupe ruled the roost. The fall play was Neil Simon's
Plaza Suite
and the boys were thick as thieves in the cast. John was the angst-ridden businessman in the first act.

"I was the serious one," John lamented, "which has always been my lot in life."

I played a Hollywood movie producer in the second act, and Bill Kirk, the school star of his day, headlined the farcical act three. Sam portrayed the bumbling bellhop throughout all the acts.

The spring musical was George S. Kaufman's political satire,
Of Thee I Sing.
I didn't get a role in that because I assumed the duties of assistant director. That job provided a great vantage point to watch a play develop.

For some strange reason, I was also assigned to design the set, something that I was loathe to do, and for good reason -- the end result was embarrassing. Sam and John remembered it fondly:

Sam: You designed it? I didn't know you designed it.

Bruce: Yeah, there were the three tiered bleachers --

John: What do you mean, you designed the set? Did you get credit for it?

Bruce: Yeah, Set Designer and it was these horrible plateaued tiers --

Sam: A musical on those four-foot bleacher step downs -- I almost killed myself on those sets.

Bruce: No one really knew who did it, but everyone kept saying, "Those are the ugliest sets I've ever seen in my life." I kept hearing it and I was like, "Oh no."

John: And you never lived up to it.

Bruce: Hell no. They had like a red, white and blue stripe on them. They were papier-mâché --

John: Looked like painted cheap boulders. Yeah, that set sucked.

An actor fell ill the night of a performance (déjà vu all over again) and I was enlisted to fill in his role as chief justice of the Supreme Court. He only had a few scenes and didn't sing much, so it seemed doable. The wild card was a fellow Supreme Court justice -- played by Mr. Sam Raimi. He was like a bad rash, this guy -- you just couldn't get rid of him.

Everything was going fine until the justices huddled to discuss the merits of the First Lady's corn muffins. We had just sampled the crumbly things, and as we gathered, I could see almost an entire muffin hanging off Sam's fake beard. I started to giggle, but managed to contain myself until Sam, out of the blue, blurted a non sequitur that did me in.

"These muffins taste like shit," he said, spitting out crumbs. "I'm gonna shove 'em up the president's ass."

I couldn't hold my laughter anymore and the fake beard sprang from my face. The giggles are a curse for any actor, and are impossible to shake once you get them -- especially when the cue for your singing number is immediately after this incident. So, before a packed auditorium, I whirled around, clamped a hand over my beard, and laughed my way through the longest twenty seconds of my life.

Around this time, Sam suckered me into a talent show, hosted by the Franklin Village Junior players. We were billed as the Bonzoid Sisters and our costumes were comprised of long underwear and gym shorts. The idea was to perform lame gymnastic routines and demand applause -- sort of like Cirque du Soieil, minus the talent. In between these routines we would often hurl ourselves in every direction for no apparent reason.

Bruce: I remember the bruises on our bodies -- I've never seen bruises before or since like those.

Sam: We were like bruised bananas.

Bruce: -- I'm sure that I screwed up my elbows. I mean I know I've done something bad to them...

Sam: I didn't screw up my elbows, but my muscle and skin there was so damaged. It was so --

Bruce: My elbows were purple. It was horrifying. There was no concept of padding whatsoever.

The moment of truth for our act was auditioning for Cedar Point, a theme park in Sandusky, Ohio. Obviously, the organizers didn't share our enthusiasm and we were dismissed without comment.

Little did they know that they were passing up the opportunity to work with Douglas Sills, Sam's boyhood neighbor, the third man of our act. He has since become quite the Broadway sensation in
The Scarlet Pimpernel,
among others.

5

SUPER-DUPER-8

As our ambitions grew, so did our budgets. The average film cost of around a hundred bucks soon ballooned to four or five hundred. Eventually, a question began to loom:
Can we actually make money with these things?

In his first year at college, Sam shot a film called
The Happy Valley Kid,
starring his roommate, Rob Tapert.

In Sam's words, "He was a student just like you. His roommate abused him, his girlfriend dumped him and his professor hated him. Then, the week before finals, his mind snapped. He became -- the Happy Valley Kid."

The film was shot on the campus of Michigan State University, featuring Sam and Rob's actual professors. Josh, Scott, John and I came up on weekends to fill in the various roles of snotty desk clerks, mean-spirited classmates, security guards, etc.

The finished
Kid
cost $700 -- something like 2.5 million in 1978 dollars. The film was advertised in
The State News
and shown Friday and Saturday nights on campus for $1.50. Word of mouth spread and it became a hit -- grossing well over $5,000 (I'll let you do the math).

"It was a really weird experience for us," Sam recalled. "Every night the place was packed and every night we'd split this tin of dollar bills -- fifty dollars for Ivan (Sam's older brother), fifty dollars for me and fifty dollars for Rob. It was like, 'What the hell's going on here?'"