If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor (13 page)

8

LOW MAN ON A GREASED TOTEM

Near the end of my college career, I got whiff of a guy who made commercials in Detroit. As an ad executive, my dad worked with this fellow, Verne, on several occasions and spoke highly of his creativity.

In Verne's youth, he had served as a "gofer" (go-fer
this
Verne, go-fer
that
) for Hollywood director, George Stevens -- fortunately for me, he was eager to take a young filmmaker under his wing. Thus began the real-world tutelage that I craved, so Friday afternoons, I'd head home from Kalamazoo via Greyhound bus.

Our driver, Roy, nicknamed "Mr. Excitement," was famous for his interminable monologues over the loudspeaker -- he loved to rattle off the list of stops and reprimand dope smokers in the back of the bus, but his shining moment came when our bus hit a deer. We didn't just bump it, or wing it -- we
destroyed
it. I was sitting above a wheel well and shuddered as I felt what was left of Bambie flap underneath.

"Now, you folks saw that I couldn't avoid it," Roy explained. "I can't endanger the lives of my passengers for a deer. Michigan's got plenty of them -- that's why they extended the hunting season this year. As a matter-of-fact, my brother-in-law and I went out last weekend..."

"Good God, make him stop," I begged the stranger next to me.

The following Sunday morning, I'd find myself at Verne's house learning the basics of filmmaking -- often with Sam Raimi, Scott Spiegel or Mike Ditz in tow. We started by showing Verne our Super-8 films. He enjoyed them very much, but still offered tips on how to keep action flowing from shot to shot (otherwise known as screen direction), as well as editing and camera techniques. This went on for many weekends and I consider it to be the most valuable "schooling" I've ever had.

As soon as college and I parted ways, I put the word out to Verne about my official availability -- within a month I was holding up cue cards for Ronald Reagan's daughter, Maureen, on a national Chevrolet commercial. My diary will explain:

What can I say? I was young...

A production assistant had the privilege of being the ultimate fly-on-the-wall -- I was everywhere, virtually invisible, yet had no official job description. When not getting Dunkin' Donuts and coffee for the crew, or dropping exposed film off at the laboratory, I could be driving Verne's kids to the dentist.

Aside from the indignities, it was a wonderful opportunity to see just how fake advertising was -- we tweaked, manipulated and fudged the look and performance of lawn sprinklers, fertilizer, motorcycles, appliances, pizzas and even Cyalume Light Sticks.

Verne was doing well in the commercial business, but his heart wasn't in it -- his dream was to put together legitimate film and television projects so he didn't have to do commercials anymore. The idea behind it all was sincere, and Verne's sights were set on a musical fantasy called
The Magic Balloon
, a bittersweet tale of a child's trip to a zoo.

Funding for this production was hardly in place when we began, but Verne, the consummate salesman, managed to get equipment, personnel and post-production support for virtually nothing. I was upgraded to some form of assistant director, but the bulk of my inflated salary was deferred.

Shooting progressed well, until the day came to film the actual balloon ride. Hoping to cheat the effect, Verne tied this volatile thing to the back of a pickup truck and expected his actors to jump in.

The lead actress would have none of this. She locked herself in her car and refused to come out, so Verne did what any committed director would do -- he dressed his partner, Karen, in the actress' costume and put her in the balloon.

Little did Verne know, he was about to get the footage of a lifetime -- a gust of wind caught the balloon on the upswing and the guide rope snapped like thread, sending the balloon toward the heavens. Fortunately, the pilot was aboard and he went into action -- his first job being to keep the lead actor from leaping to his death. Once that crisis was averted, he hit the gas, hoping to get above the low treeline, but he miscalculated and the entire balloon went crashing through the trees.

The entire time, Verne bellowed to Steve, his cameraman, "Keep shooting! Keep shooting!"

Rushing to the scene, we found the balloon's inhabitants ruffled, but unhurt -- and about a hundred feet from the lion's den.

The Magic Balloon
led to the demise of Verne's company and subsequently to my unemployment, but this professional experience was a crucial dose of reality. I learned that actors were but the tip of the production iceberg and that the world most certainly did not revolve around them, as much as they liked to think so. Most importantly, I got to learn the nuts and bolts of film production and it stoked the fires of my ambition.

9

DRIVING MISS CRAZY

Ever since the film
Taxi Driver
came out, a lingering romantic image of the lone driver stuck in my mind. Obviously I wasn't alone. In all, five of the boys took up the call and "hacked" to make ends meet during this post-college,
what are we gonna do with our lives?
transitional period.

Josh Becker, Mike Ditz, John Cameron and I all took up the wheel under the auspices of the Southfield Cab Company. Rob Tapert enjoyed a very brief stint with Detroit Cab -- an entire day. Scott Spiegel and Sam Raimi held more reasonable jobs during this time, those of stock boy and busboy respectively.

The rest of us worked the night shift from about 5:00 P.M. to 5:00 A.M. The great thing about this type of truly "odd" job was the fact that if you couldn't show up for work, they really didn't give a rat's ass -- they'd simply fill the cab with another warm body.

Mike Ditz, John Cameron and I seemed to vacillate between #11, #98 and #99, all owned by the Beezaks, the cab company honchos. Thankfully, I usually managed to avoid #98 and its dreaded carbon monoxide leak -- in order to live through the night, you had to drive with the windows rolled down.

Josh was the odd man out, driving #33 -- a Wyler cab. Ben Wyler was the dirtiest man I had ever seen. He was a human version of the
Peanuts
cartoon character, Pig Pen. It wasn't necessarily a hygiene problem with Ben -- it was just that he did all of the maintenance on his cars.

In this freakshow job, I wasn't sure who was the stranger group -- passengers or drivers. Flip was a Vietnam vet who dated a stripper. Lee lived at the Blue Bird Motel not far away. The only reason he drove was to support a serious racing habit. You haven't lived until you've seen a fifty-year-old man, failing to secure yet another loan, break down in the office and bemoan his misbegotten life.

Mary was the three hundred-pound queen bee dispatcher with a heart of stone. If she liked you, IBM, the new dream client, was yours for the taking. If you pissed her off, you'd be picking up ice cream, cigarettes and Diet Pepsi for her at all hours of the night.

A regular client of mine claimed to work for the Carter administration in a "top-secret" capacity. Many a night, I'd take this anonymous man from his favorite watering hole to a street corner and drop him off. I was never allowed to take him all the way home because that was "strictly need-to-know."

Cab drivers, I learned, are invisible. Extremely personal conversations played out in the backseat, all within earshot of the nonentity behind the wheel. I particularly enjoyed listening in on the drunken ramblings of a man desperately trying to lure a woman into an affair. He was well on his way, since our destination was a motel. I was so naïve I was actually shocked to learn the true nature of those seemingly benign motels I had passed on Woodward Avenue all the years prior.

Cab drivers are also surrogate priests -- taking confessions from businessmen who have sinned against their wives. One fellow felt obliged to overly rationalize an affair that I wasn't even witness to.

"Look, I'm gonna tell my wife eventually," he reasoned. "Just not today..."

Cab drivers are easy targets as well, because it's assumed that we are morons -- why else would we be driving a cab? As a result, I declined many in-kind services of prostitutes headed home after a long night of tricks.

Hooker: Can I eat my fare, baby?

Bruce: Sorry, ma'am, I've gotta buy my own gasoline and, well, you know how prices are these days.

Other nights, when the woman was attractive, it wasn't as easy to decline. A beautiful hooker stepped out of my cab in front of her modest Detroit home.

Hooker: Want to come inside?

Bruce: Well, gee, I...

Hooker: We'd just call it even, how's that? That's a good deal, honey.

Twenty-three dollars for the time of my life seemed like an
incredible
deal, but my bank account was low enough to decline.

Sometimes, cab drivers are targets of a more insidious nature. John's cab karma wasn't good -- on one occasion, his cab was egged, then stoned.

Later, he was held up at gunpoint just outside the city of Detroit. Our cabs didn't have what we referred to as "ghetto glass" between ourselves and the passengers. Fortunately for John, he wasn't injured -- just scared to death, and he quit that night.

My tour of duty in the metropolitan Detroit area lasted about a year. At this point, I was three years out of high school and a college dropout. As a cab-driving actor, I was a cliché on wheels. It was time to get on with things.

10

THE HUMBLE BEGINNING OF THE HUMBLE BEGINNING

Cut to January 1979.

I had a low-rent apartment in Royal Oak, Michigan. Rob and Sam were in East Lansing, attending Michigan State University where Sam was studying literature and Rob was finishing up an economics degree.

Rob had become very involved in
The Happy Valley Kid,
since he played the lead role, and was equally fascinated with the
It's Murder!
debacle. Sam brought the film up to MSU to finish it during school and he enlisted Rob to help -- to the extent that he was soon missing final exams.