Hail to the Chin E-Book

Bruce Campbell

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 427

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

It's been 15 years since his first memoir but Bruce is still living the dream as a "B" movie king in an "A" movie world.Bruce Campbell makes his triumphant return from where he left off in If Chins Could Kill with further hilarious, gut-wrenchingly honest confessions.Bruce brings us through his life in the decade since his first memoir and his roles as varied as they are numerous- from his roles in the Spider-man movies to his self-referential My Name is Bruce to his role on #1 show Burn Notice and his new STARZ hit series Ash vs Evil Dead.Over the last 15 years, Bruce has become a regular on the Wizard World convention circuit, has created his @GroovyBruce twitter account with over 400,000 followers and a Facebook page with almost 250,000 likes. His profile and reach is lightyears beyond where it was for Chins. Check him out at www.Bruce-Campbell.com.Hail to the Chin will be bursting with pictures and the signature humor that Bruce brought to If Chins Could Kill and will be devoured by his legions of fans across the country.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Bruce Campbell

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction by John Hodgman

Pre-Ramble

1.    Exodus

2.    Jack of One Season

3.    Gnome, Sweet Gnome

4.    A Hunk of Bubba Love

5.    Hello, Neighbor!

6.    Getting High

7.    Lovemaking

8.    The Big Thaw

9.    Apocalypse How

10.  Attack of the Screaming Brain

11.  Life on the Wild Side

12.  What’s My Name?

13.  Rise of the Master Cylinder

14.  Ashes to Axes

15.  To Iraq and Baq

16.  Legends of the Fall

17.  Afterburn

18.  Hollywood in Pontiac!

19.  Hardly Functional

20.  Kissin’ Hands and Shakin’ Babies – the Con Game

21.  Crawling Back into the Womb

Acknowledgments

Known Image Credits

Also by Bruce CampbellIf Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie ActorMake Love the Bruce Campbell Way

HAIL TO THE CHINPRINT ISBN: 9781785656842E-BOOK ISBN: 9781785657047

Published byTitan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark StreetLondon SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

HAIL TO THE CHIN. Copyright © 2017 by Bruce Campbell. All rights reserved.

See here for known image credits.

Published by Titan Books, London, in 2017.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

First Edition: August 2017

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Joanne

INTRODUCTION

BY JOHN HODGMAN

When I first got access to decently fast internet, I did what everyone did: I typed in my own name. It was twenty years ago. I was an assistant at Writers House, an accredited literary agency in New York City, and we had just gotten a T1 line. Prior to this my internet experience had been walled in by the slow, screeching garden of dial-up AOL. Now I had the World Wide Web – indeed, the world – on my desktop. And with new and remarkable speed, Alta Vista told me I did not exist in it.

The next thing I did was to type in “Bruce Campbell.”

I knew about Bruce because in high school Nicholas McCarthy showed me The Evil Dead. Then in college, I watched The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. with Jonathan Coulton before it was briskly cancelled. Bruce was already a cult celebrity by this time, but it is both important and difficult to remember that this time, before Internet had meaningfully saturated our lives, cults still met in the dark. Before YouTube, social media, even blogging, nerds only found their fellow cult members in slow motion, via letter columns and yearly regional conventions. They had not yet mobilized via the Web into a massive, cranky, demanding, and inspiring consumer and cultural force. Since I didn’t exist on the internet, I wanted to know if there was anyone else out there like me. So like any nerd, I typed in some code words – a single ping into all that darkness – and waited for what echo came back. What came back was Bruce.

Along with a half dozen Bruce Campbell fansites was bruce-campbell.com. It didn’t look that great. The design was unflashy and homegrown. There may have been some Comic Sans in use. But because it was so cheesy and charming and great at the same time, I knew it could only be real Bruce behind it. And it was. I am usually right.

Aside from posting the dates of his appearances at upcoming horror movie conventions, Bruce told stories on his Web site. He wrote about the tedium of leaving his family to live in Mexico for months to shoot his few scenes in a movie that no one would remember (unless you happen to be the nerd who runs a Tumblr devoted to Tom Arnold’s interpretation of McHale’s Navy). He wrote about the sweat and fake blood that he and Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert had to pour into The Evil Dead to get it, impossibly, made. He wrote about the strangeness of being like unto a God within the hotel ballroom that is hosting this small horror movie convention, only to step into the hotel lobby, a suddenly anonymous, unfamous Shemp. He wrote about a fox he saw one day when he went out for a bike ride.

I thought it would all make an interesting book. (Well, not the fox part, though I still love that story. There is something unmistakably Bruce – his openness to the world and small pleasures – in his turning to the Internet to report that he saw a cool fox that day). I clicked on the link that was an e-mail address. I typed a few more words into the darkness, and then forgot about it. Until Bruce wrote back.

Of course Bruce checked his own e-mail. At least then he did, because he could. He knew how few of us weirdos were out there – enough to delight with his Web site and fox tales, but not enough to bother him with too much attention or money. I did not understand this at the time. I thought I had hit a gusher. Someone had just sold a Whoopi Goldberg book for almost a million dollars. And since I had the cultural face-blindness of the young nerd that could not differentiate between the fame of Bruce Campbell and Whoopi Goldberg, I thought Bruce’s sudden blind trust in me was not only A) astonishingly kind, but also B) well-placed, and C) the start of a very successful career as a professional literary agent. Only A was true.

Bruce mentioned casually in his own afterword to If Chins Could Kill that it was not easy to find a publisher for that book. I will be less casual: it was rough. Bruce wrote an amazing proposal along with the help of his incredible assistant Craig (who I am thrilled to see back in the byline with this book). But as I called around, I realized I had underestimated how many New York book editors loved Army of Darkness; and equally, I underestimated the sniffy contempt so many New York book editors would have for those nerds who did. Army of Darkness was a cult movie, beloved by a few weirdos, but dismissed by the mass mono-culture that could only be reached by big publishers and studios and record labels and broadcast TV, the same mass mono-culture that was the only way to make money and which would go on forever and ever. The rejections poured in, each a humiliating gut punch: I was not only failing, I was failing my hero.

In 1999 or 2000, I went with Bruce to a horror movie convention at the New Yorker Hotel near Penn Station. Conventions were still like Bruce’s old web site: small, a little ramshackle, and summer-campy. No one was coming to launch a major media property there. It was weirdos who loved weird things, including Bruce Campbell. Seven hundred or so people crowded into the room for his Q&A. Bruce answered every question. He reassured the crowd that they should not be worried: his old high school pal Sam Raimi was the perfect person to bring Spider-Man to the screen. He encouraged them to get out there and make movies just like he and Sam had done. He pointed out that the most profitable movie of that year had been The Blair Witch Project, which had been self-produced, shot on consumer grade equipment, and home-publicized using the Internet. Things are changing, Bruce pointed out.

I had sent out a videotape (a videotape!) of an appearance like this, from an earlier convention, with each proposal. Who knows if the publishers watched it, and if they did, whether they were impressed. All of them rejected the proposal except one, Barry Neville, of St. Martin’s Press.

Barry was there with me now at the New Yorker Hotel. It was the spring before If Chins Could Kill would be published. We watched the fans line up, hundreds of them, to bring their T-shirts and Ash figurines and bared chests for Bruce’s signature. In a few months they would come back with books in their hands. This would happen in dozens of cities across the country. I’m sure its sales did not rival Whoopi Goldberg’s, but it was enough to put it on the New York Times bestseller list. And I guarantee it made the publisher a profit, because I know what the advance was.

Barry was brave to have fought to acquire the book, but his was a bravery of love, not of business. Neither of us knew the book would succeed. We only guessed based on what Bruce had told and shown us: you can cultivate a good and profitable artistic career by knowing your audience and keeping them close; that soon we would all have to do that, because mass mono-culture was largely not going to exist anymore; and that Sam Raimi would do a good job at Spider-Man. By the time Spider-Man opened to almost 100 million dollars in one weekend, it was becoming clear: what mass culture would remain would be nerd culture.

Was Bruce ahead of his time? Yes. But the success of Chins, like all his successes, stems more from the fact that he is an old-fashioned good dude. Before he signed with me I had to meet his manager. It was a hot summer Sunday. He was in town for some premiere, and I had just bought a blazer to make myself look like a grown up. It just made me sweat, and that sweat grew cold in the a/c of the Au Bon Pain where we sat as I tried to figure out how I was going to convince this man to put his client into my soft, inexperienced hands.

But I didn’t have to worry. The manager was bemused, a living sigh of “what’s Bruce gotten into now?” He told me a story about how a major director wanted Bruce for a big mini-series, but Bruce turned him down. He had promised Rob Tapert he would do Xena this year, and Bruce kept his word. So when Bruce was armed with the technology to reach the whole world, of course he would keep it personal, straightforward and groovy. To help people reach out to him, and to give people chances. If some kid wrote to him about writing a book, he’d take it seriously. And if he went insane or got drunk and accidentally agreed to let John Hodgman represent him, he wouldn’t go back on his word now.

When Nicholas McCarthy showed me The Evil Dead in high school, all he wanted to be was a horror director. He is that now (his movie, The Pact, is one of my favorites). When I watched Brisco County, Jr. with Jonathan Coulton in college, all he wanted to be was a musician who wrote songs about technology and feelings. He is that now. All I ever wanted to do was become a semi-famous person like Bruce Campbell. Bruce’s hard work and legacy of awesomeness and decency allowed this to happen, and we are but three data points among the people he has inspired.

I am grateful, always, for his faith in letting me join him at the beginning of his book-writing career, and also for his understanding when, once Chins was published, I realized I would be a terrible literary agent and thus had to quit. I looked back on the book this morning and remembered all of this and wrote it down, and I am grateful to you for letting me air these memories out. I also noticed in the latest edition of Chins Bruce corrected the spelling of my name from HODGEMAN to HODGMAN. I guess I’m grateful for that too, though it did rob me of a chance to make fun of him.

Thanks, Bruce.

That is all.

John Hodgman

PRE-RAMBLE

Back in 1997, a literary agent named John Hodgman contacted me and asked if I had ever considered writing an autobiography. I guess he read a few early, primitive “blogs” on my Web site and found them amusing. But writing a book about myself? No, I hadn’t ever thought about it, but it was an intriguing possibility. I did love reading biographies about actors, but there weren’t too many out there about the so-called B-listers.

“That’s exactly the point,” John explained. “Tell the story of the underexposed working stiffs of the silver screen.”

I set about scrawling outlines, anecdotes and notes on the backs of screenplays. Within a few years, I had managed to come up with enough words and dig up enough old photographs to tell the story of my life. If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor was unleashed upon the literary world in 2001, and I’m proud to “confess” that it became a New York Times bestseller.

That was fifteen years ago. As I looked back I realized that if this were a movie, the first book would really only be Act One, where you meet your hero and follow him through his formative years. This might very well be part two of a three-act story. This book has a little more of the “meat” of my life as an experienced actor, with more “adult” experiences.

I had originally intended to write a travel memoir titled Vagabond: An Actor’s Gypsy Life, but my stories were so intrinsically tied to my ongoing career that it all just worked better as my “further confessions.”

If you’ve already read If Chins Could Kill, the following few pages are a breezy reminder of my life from my childhood in Michigan to my “legendary journeys” with a “warrior princess.”

If you’ve never read If Chins Could Kill, your life is as dull as toast, but it’s still available in four different editions: the hardcover, trade paperback, audiobook (read by yours truly) and full-color, gently updated e-book.

Regardless, I’m about to recap my first tale at the beginning of the new one. Why not? It worked for Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness…

PREVIOUSLY ON…

The youngest son of Charlie and Joanne, I was born in 1958 outside of Detroit, Michigan. I spent my happy childhood digging tunnels, building forts and creating UFO scares with my brothers, Mike and Don. I was your typical suburban kid until one fateful day in 1966 when I saw my father performing onstage as part of a local theater troupe. The thespian seed was planted and it wasn’t long before I landed my first acting role in The King and I at our beloved St. Dunstan’s Theatre.

Local theater was only the beginning. There was something else brewing during my adolescence. Over the years, I met and amassed a tight group of friends, like-minded “Shemps” who rallied together under the banner of Super-8 filmmaking. Super-8 was a grainy, primitive medium, but it was a shared passion in my group (along with the Three Stooges) and we all took turns with the various duties making numerous screwball comedies.

My buddies Mike Ditz, Scott Spiegel, Josh Becker, John Cameron and Dave Goodman were all serious about pursuing the dreams we cultivated together, but one kid named Sam Raimi was “a different bird entirely.” Sam and I met in drama class in 1975 and bonded immediately over our embarrassing failures at improv. He brought a lot to our filmmaking troupe, including a creative fire, a devilish sense of humor, a goofy little brother and a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta Royale.

High school ended and, thanks to my mother’s encouragement, I interned at the Cherry County Playhouse. A valuable learning experience, this was my first time working among professional actors, with all their wisdom and quirks. My college career lasted all of six months because I already knew what I wanted to do. I believed the best education would be to actually start working in the entertainment industry. I became a production assistant for local commercials and got to see how a “real” film set operated.

The “boys” and I continued to get together at every opportunity to make more Super-8 shorts. Only now we had a new member: Sam’s roommate, Rob Tapert. As we grew, so did the scope (and cost) of our projects. Sam and Rob’s “The Happy Valley Kid” cost $700 but actually made about $5,000 at the box office/college’s campus theater. We began to think that our films might actually be able to make some money.

Up next was Sam’s ambitious flop, It’s Murder! This time, he wanted to produce a feature-length story, complete with a large cast, stunts – even a car chase. It cost over $2,000, which was a huge amount of money in 1978. Alas, for all our effort and expense, It’s Murder! bombed, but within the film was a surprising silver lining that sealed our fates. In one scene, a character lurched forward from the backseat of a car so unexpectedly that it scared the audience – every time we showed it. Maybe pratfalls and slapstick weren’t the keys to success. What if the path to fortune and glory was paved with shock and horror?

Sam, Rob and I started officially working toward making a feature-length horror film. We started with the production of a “proof of concept” short called “Within the Woods” that we could screen for potential investors. For all of our inexperience, we were committed to getting our feature funded, made and distributed.

After many months of shooting and several years of effort, expense, injury and near-sex experiences, our film was finished. With the help of marketing guru Irvin Shapiro and the endorsement of horror authority Stephen King, we were a hit at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Soon after, Evil Dead was released in England, but a domestic distributor had yet to be found.

Thankfully, the movie took off across the big ditch – second only to the blockbuster E.T. in some areas – and it awoke New Line Cinema’s interest here in the United States. The film was released in 1983 and did very well – for New Line Cinema. We got an “advance” of $125,000 and it was the last penny we ever saw.

Fishing for distributors.

The emergence of home video came to the rescue and Evil Dead ultimately sold more than a million VHS tapes through Thorn EMI, an astonishingly reputable video distributor. None of this happened overnight. The film was shot in 1979, released in 1982/3 and took six years to break even. In this case, it was the rights fee to make Evil Dead II that put the original movie partnership in the black.

Based on the strength of foreign sales for the first film, the sequel came together very quickly. We were happy to get back to a world we understood after our second film, Crime-wave, died a thousand deaths. Evil Dead II was so sought after, partner Rob Tapert walked on the set during pre-production and announced that the film was already in profit due to pre-sales of various rights around the world.

When Evil Dead II came out in 1987, it did moderately well at the box office, but it didn’t seem to matter – we already made what we were going to make, profit-wise.

By then, I was a working actor, living in Los Angeles with my family: wife, Cristine, daughter, Rebecca and son, Andy. The Evil Dead movies had established me as a “horror guy” and I was cast in a slew of B movies, ranging from psycho slasher flicks to sci-fi adventures.

As the 1990s approached, I joined Josh Becker and Dave Goodman in producing Josh’s indie comedy Lunatics: A Love Story. Alas, with repeated extended absences, the film industry can be brutal to families and I returned home from shooting Lunatics to discover that Cris wanted a divorce.

Despondent, I burrowed back into my B movie pigeonhole. There, on the set of Mindwarp, I met a feisty costume designer named Ida who took pity on me and my rusty efforts to woo her. Ida and I were married in 1991 and are still going.

The next time Evil Dead reared its ugly head was that same year, when Sam, Rob and I convinced Dino De Laurentiis and Universal to team up and make Army of Darkness. This third installment was, to us, epic in proportions. The budget went from 8, to 11, to 13 million. In the process, we put a boatload of our own money in the flick, lost creative control of the editing and generally had a miserable time making the thing.

Army of Darkness made about $13 million at the box office. In order to recoup our inflated budget, we would have to make three times that. The Evil Dead franchise, if you could even call it that, was officially dead in the water. But, hey, I couldn’t expect to play Evil Dead’s Ash character for the rest of my life, could I? (wink)

I moved into television, landing the lead role in a Fox Western called The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Although fans loved it, the ratings failed to impress the network and Fox canceled it after one season. Honestly, though, I was a bit relieved. Being a leading man in an hour-long episodic series was exhausting and I shifted my sights toward supporting characters and one-off TV movies. Roles on Lois & Clark, Ellen, The X-Files, The Love Bug and other TV gigs mingled with more B movie roles and the occasional A-lister.

It’s not too late…

In the meantime, Sam and Rob kept busy, starting up a syndicated action show called Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. I directed a few episodes, but my most memorable contribution to the series was my recurring role as Autolycus. As Hercules headed toward the end of its six-season run in the late 1990s, I began to direct and appear in its successful spin-off, Xena: Warrior Princess. I can honestly say that working on those two shows was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career.

And that – in a B movie nutshell – was the first forty years of my life. Still on board? Still interested in reading what I’ve been up to between then and now?

If so, groovy.

If not, no refunds.

EXODUS

My mom, even though raised in the Midwest, was a huge fan of Westerns and had a deep fondness for the world to the west of Detroit. As a boy, I’d doodle little flip book animations in the corners of her Zane Grey books. The author had written more than fifty Westerns, but I only knew him as the guy who wrote books that I used to draw cartoons.

Michiganders had a long-standing tradition of heading south to Florida when weather got bad or the holidays were upon us. My mother broke that tradition. She didn’t want to go south – she wanted to go west.

“This Christmas, let’s go to Phoenix instead,” she offered.

The family looked at her in unison. “Phoenix…Arizona?” we asked.

“Yep.”

“Do they even have Christmas in Arizona?”

The takeaway from our “Western” holiday wasn’t about fake snow being blown on entire neighborhoods to replicate the season – it was about staring at the vast, empty expanses outside my airplane window on the way to Phoenix. I was transfixed by large areas of desert that still didn’t have any roads.

How is that even possible? I’d ask myself.

It wasn’t like I grew up in a really crowded area, but there were always people around. My neighbors, while not packed in tenement-style, were everywhere. Every road – and most were paved – had cars on it, any time of day. Humanity was a constant.

The only respite, and one that I really took to, was property my parents bought outside of Gladwin, Michigan. At 160 acres, it was a quarter-mile square of woods, meadows and bogs – classic Michigan terrain. My mother designed and oversaw a small but fully functional cabin on a bluff overlooking the lower acreage. Many a weekend was spent at this wonderful getaway.

When my parents divorced in 1980, the property was sold as part of the settlement. This turn of events haunts me to this day. When Mom and Dad split, I was still struggling to complete Evil Dead and didn’t have a pot to piss in monetarily, so I had to watch, helplessly, while my personal slice of paradise slipped away. That harrowing experience planted a seed that would grow twenty years later.

Post-divorce, Mom moved west to start a new life. She remarried, a rancher, and they migrated from one piece of western property to another. Whenever I wanted to see Mom, I’d make my way to wherever she lived at the time – Sequim, Washington; Nevada City, California or Humbug, Oregon. I loved seeing the new places she found and it really cemented my idea that the West was different – in almost every way.

The first time I saw the Milky Way was out west, while working on Sundown: A Vampire in Retreat in Moab, Utah. I was astounded. It was real. I felt like I was starting to reconnect a little bit with the natural world. While making that movie, I explored the Utah outback at every opportunity when I wasn’t working.

It was the first time in my entire existence, while at the Navajo National Monument, when the only sound I could hear was the crunch of gravel under my feet on a remote trail. A crow passed by across the canyon and I could hear its wings flap, so distant was any traffic or ambient, human-created noise. Solitude was something I began to crave.

When I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting more seriously, I threw myself into a sea of humanity. Los Angeles has been described many ways: The City of Angels, The Big Orange, La-La Land. I call it the City of Sloppy Seconds.

Ironies abound – the guy with the fancy sports car can’t get it over 45 miles per hour because of all the traffic; the “health nut” unknowingly sucks the equivalent of half a pack of Camels in particulate matter every day; the “Mellow” Californian doesn’t exist – not in Los Angeles anyway.

About ten years into my L.A. “residency,” I was returning from a trip with Ida – my wife and co-conspirator for twenty-five years – late in the afternoon. Through the airplane window, we could see the unmistakable pale orange band of smog blanketing the city. This wasn’t “marine layer” or anything atmospheric – this was pure, big-city smog. Ida and I glanced at each other. I extended my right hand.

“Let’s make a deal to get out of here in five years.”

She took my hand and shook it firmly. “Deal.”

To assuage her that we wouldn’t starve if we moved out to the boonies somewhere, I drew up a “where did I work in 1997?” chart. It turned out that 70 percent of my movie or TV work took place outside of Los Angeles. With better rebate deals being offered by New Zealand, Canada, Bulgaria and others, film production left California at an alarming rate.

Only 30 percent of my work was in Los Angeles? Why was I still here?

Our five-year escape plan came to fruition within a year.

GO NORTHWEST, YOUNG MAN!

By this time, my mother lived in Ashland, Oregon, and she dabbled in real estate. Mom was an early “flipper.” She loved buying places for cash, fixing them up and selling them whenever she and her new husband, Bob, got bored.

In an exploratory phase, Ida and I were looking for a house that wasn’t in a standard neighborhood or even a small town – we wanted a place that was farther out, ideally with land.

Oregon seemed like as nice a place as any. It encompassed anything from high desert to mountainous forest to desolate coastline. Oregon was on the same coast as Los Angeles, so the whole time zone thing would be the same – and there was a two-hour direct flight from Medford to Los Angeles once a day.

This could work.

Ida and Ma scouting our “next location.”

I asked Mom to fax me some real estate listings and a few of them seemed promising. Ida and I headed north.

Oregon in the fall is grand – it’s a mix of still-warm days, breezy sunshine and fall colors. The day we accompanied Mom to see the Applegate Valley property was the kind of day real estate agents pray for: sunny, crisp with the slightest of breezes to remind us that it was fall. This particular piece of property was situated on a hill with spectacular south-facing views of the Siskiyou Mountains.

The setting was very appealing, but the ownership map told me everything I needed to know – our property was surrounded on three sides by land administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM – more on them later) and our mountainous view was also either BLM or National Forest Service land.

A mountain range with no lights on it. Where do I sign up?

I immediately turned into a lousy house negotiator because I instantly wanted the place.

“Ida, you know when you buy a house, you’re supposed to pretend that you’re not really that interested?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I don’t care. I want to buy this place. I want to whip out a check right now to hold it.”

Ida was a little stunned. “Really?”

“Really.”

We put a check in the owner’s hand as a deposit and bought the place. Just like that, Ida and I were done with Los Angeles. Our new life in the wilderness had begun!

JACK OF ONE SEASON

The irony of being a working actor was that I was so busy globe-trotting that I barely got to spend any time in my new home. In 1998, I made a deal to appear in ten episodes of Hercules and Xena and direct two of them.

I regard the Hercules and Xena time period as a blast because of the creative nature of it. Rob Tapert and the other producers trusted us, and because it was syndicated we didn’t have the overbearing infrastructure of a studio with endless, nitpicky notes. Alas, Hercules and Xena ran their course after six seasons each.

After almost a decade in the Land of the Long White Cloud, Rob Tapert had cultivated not only an impressive episodic TV machine but also an important reputation in syndicated television. When the Warrior Princess made her exit, an hour-long hole was left in the schedule and Universal Studios (and Rob) had every intention of filling that slot. They were looking for another action-y set of shows to replace swords and sandals, ideally without pause. For better or for worse, the next two shows came together very quickly.

BACK-TO-BACK ACTION HACK

When a show like Hercules or Xena airs for five or six years, it is eventually going to lose viewership – that’s just a fact of TV life. When viewership declines, the studio can’t command the number-one time slot anymore or get the highest advertising rates. Shows then get moved to less desirable slots. Therefore, some replacement shows started their run in “downgraded” slots – the harbinger of cancellation, in my opinion. Such was the case with Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra: 2525.

Nevertheless, the producers still wanted to continue the successful pairing of a “guy show” with a “girl show,” so they developed Jack and Cleopatra, two half-hour action comedies, dubbed the “Back-to-Back Action Pack.” It was a very rare, very strange combo that Rob somehow managed to sell to the syndicators.

Because we were no strangers to the Auckland setup, Rob tapped both myself and Josh Becker to help participate in the two shows. Mine was Jack of All Trades, a period piece about America’s first international spy. I was intrigued by the concept. The story took place in 1801 and was set in the West Indies, where the United States had sent a spy to keep an eye on Napoléon (ultimately played by the great two foot eight Vern Troyer).

Jack was basically what Zorro – one of my favorite characters as a kid – would be like if he had been played by comedian Bob Hope. The approach of the material was very much my sensibility. I like borderline vaudeville humor. I enjoyed making fun of Thomas Jefferson, kings and rich people in general.

The model Rob had in mind was Hogan’s Heroes. To Rob, the series should be confined to just one French-controlled Caribbean island and focus only on the ongoing conflict between the heroes and the island’s goofy commandant. At the time, Josh and I objected to the rule that the show was never to leave the island of Pulau-Pulau and we tried to convince Rob that the show should take place along the Barbary Coast instead.

Drumming along to the opening theme.

From 1801 to 1805, the United States engaged in the First Barbary War against four North African states, targeting the predatory pirates that captured American ships and held their crews hostage. One of the earliest deployments of the U.S. Marine Corps was to the Barbary Coast and the opening lines of the “Marines’ Hymn” (not to mention the chorus of Joe LoDuca’s Jack of All Trades theme song) pays homage to this Barbary baptism: “From the Halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli…”

Beyond the battles between marines and pirates, the region was rich with possibilities – sultans, princes, Dutch captains, tribal intrigues – which could have provided a sweeping, colorful canvas for a series. Alas, Rob shot it down. In this case, I think his production team feared the multiple sets and large cast that our “angle” might demand.

While I feel the show was therefore doomed to claustrophobia, we at least tapped into the era by incorporating real historical characters such as Thomas Jefferson, Napoléon, Ben Franklin and Blackbeard (even though the latter two were technically dead by 1801).

Meanwhile, Josh had pitched Rob Tumithak of the Corridors, based on a 1932 Lovecraft-inspired public domain story. Set in an uninhabitable future occupied by spider-aliens, humankind had to burrow underground progressively deeper to survive. Ultimately, they had been underground for thousands of years and there were completely different civilizations on each layer.

Like the story, the series would center on Tumithak, one guy who sees the light from way up top and thinks, Hmmm, what’s up there? Josh’s Tumithak of the Corridors would have been this guy’s journey to the surface of the Earth, with each season being a new layer with a whole new civilization. Finally, as a possible end of the series, he’d emerge onto the surface through a manhole in Manhattan and get promptly flattened by a taxicab.

Rob was intrigued, but he wasn’t sold. He needed a “girl” show. As series development is known to do, each component of the original concept was individually removed, reworked and replaced until only morsels of the original concept remained. In went Tumithak of the Corridors; out came Cleopatra 2525 – a series about a stripper who goes in for a boob job and wakes up in the twenty-sixth century.

[long pause]

Not exactly what the author had in mind.

Somehow, a subterranean serial about survival got mixed up with the true story of an actress friend of mine who got a botched boob job in Canada, and became one of the most ridiculous concepts ever recorded.

In spite of all common sense or creative logic, “Hogan’s Heroes of the West Indies” was produced along with “Boob Job of the Corridors.” Thus, this odd, Back-to-Back Action Pack premiered with a roaring sigh on the shitty time slot left by a waning warrior princess.

CO-EXEC OF ALL TRADES

If I was going to be the star of a TV show again, I wanted it to be under the right circumstances. The big kahuna Rob Tapert, a pal for decades now, trusted me and I always enjoyed the kind of “creative lenience” on the shows he produced in New Zealand. One of the other big men on campus was Eric Gruendemann, a veteran of Herc and Xena and someone who had been tolerating me since my “temp sound” days on Darkman. Eric was a completely sane producer – a rare delight – so I knew that working with him wasn’t really going to feel like work.

Part of my deal was that I was also a coexecutive producer, which meant I wasn’t powerful enough to stand up against the studio, but I had almost enough power to make a costume designer do what I said. The title gave me a voice that people had to pretend to listen to and it allowed me to work with more impunity.

I had much more control on Jack than I did on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., where I was just an actor for hire on somebody else’s show. Carlton Cuse was a very strong show runner and we rarely disagreed with any dialogue on Brisco because it was good writing. Jack was always a more creative environment for me and we would improvise and collaborate until everyone was happy.

One sequence in particular had never been fully realized by the time we shot it, so we had no choice but to make it up on the spot. That day, we improvised every gag, every bit, every heel in the eye, every ass slap. As co-exec, I was free to shoot from the hip without having to call the studio for permission, and creatively that’s exactly where I wanted to be.

ROB IS ROBBED!

Rob Tapert had spent the latter part of the 1990s cultivating his “backlot,” refining its infrastructure and amassing an impressive library of sets, props, costumes and creatures. The now-seasoned crew had become specialists in the production of adventure entertainment. Then something happened that decimated Rob’s resources and left his studio in much worse shape than it should have been…

Orcs invaded New Zealand!

Peter Jackson started production on the Lord of the Rings trilogy in 1999, promptly engulfing and employing every able-bodied specialist in the production of adventure entertainment. Seemingly, every armorer, best boy, focus puller and four-foot-tall stand-in responded to Jackson’s muster, including the effects team at Weta Workshop and Ngila Dickson, costume designer of the trilogy (and Academy Award winner).

The masked alias of my “Batman of the West Indies” character was the Daring Dragoon. A dragoon was a member of the mounted cavalry – an imposing soldier, laying waste upon his impressive steed. Yeah, nice to want – our beleaguered crew couldn’t find a proper horse because The Fellowship of the Ring happened to prominently feature nine “Black Riders.” As a result, every black or dark brown horse in New Zealand, Australia and Papua New Guinea had been acquired by Jackson – who paid as much as a quarter-million dollars for the most photogenic equine. All we could manage for the Daring Dragoon was a bony nag I sarcastically nicknamed Lightning.

My ass still hurts.

People ask me all the time what I think about the Lord of the Rings movies. My response is always the same: “I hate ’em.”

“But, Bruce, these are Academy Award–winning, billion-dollar-box-office movies!” fans would breathlessly explain.

“I wouldn’t know,” I would clarify. “I’ve never seen them.”

“Then how could you hate them?” the crestfallen fans would ask.

The only reason I’m lounging is because the capeis so damn heavy, I can’t actually get up.

“Because Peter Jackson stole our whole Kiwi crew.”

Jack’s brash character needed a vocal, headstrong counterpart to keep him in check. This came in the form of the British spy Emilia Rothschild, played by New Zealand actress Angela Dotchin. As with many in the Kiwi talent pool, Ange cut her teeth in the New Zealand soap opera Shortland Street, then graduated to appear in one or two episodes of Young Hercules and Xena. In fact, we both appeared in the Xena episode “Tsunami,” during which I saved Ange’s life – as she put it.

In the episode, a massive ocean storm capsizes a ship carrying Xena, Gabrielle, Autolycus and various guest characters. To simulate the underwater aspect of the story, a submerged set was constructed inside a giant water tank. Life imitates art and the tank cracked open without warning, spilling more than five thousand gallons of water in a virtual ocean storm of our own.

Water flows in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps that’s why Angela ran toward the rupturing tank. I shoved her in the opposite direction and my “gallant heroism” was hailed. The truth is, Angela probably would have gotten more dampened than drowned, but I milked her praise for all it was worth.

The Jack production benefited from a combined twelve seasons of Herc and Xena – notably in executing fight scenes. Countless brawls and scuffles had been staged over the course of both shows, but I was never satisfied with the way they had been filmed. The procedure of the day, one that I bristled against, was to shoot the fights all in one uninterrupted piece, just like the stunt guys did. That’s fine if you have months to rehearse a complicated fight, but on a TV schedule you’re learning the fight the morning of the scene, so there isn’t time for all the moves to sink in. I felt that the longer fight takes lasted, the sloppier and more dangerous they became.

When Jack rolled around, we worked out a very straightforward formula for shooting fight sequences that I still use today. We broke each fight into a series of smaller, easier to execute, beats. Each chunk, now shorter, could be shot with more safety and confidence and didn’t take any more time to complete.

To their credit, Herc and Xena established a rule that “actors don’t fight other actors.” That may seem both obvious and absurd at the same time, but it was actually a very safe and successful guideline. Stunt guys are not known for their acting prowess and actors are not known for their flawless stunt work.

The master and wide shots for the fight scenes of Jack of All Trades were all staged with stunt people. In closer shots, if the Daring Dragoon was the focus the French soldier fighting him was a stuntman and vice versa. We ultimately got everything down to a nice, efficient science. No actors or stuntmen were injured during the season.

RIDING INTO THE SUNSET…AGAIN

Six years had passed since I headlined The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., my first “one-season wonder.” Jack of All Trades was to be my second. At the end of the day, Jack was a woulda, coulda, shoulda scenario. There were a lot of good elements in place, but the show was hamstrung by its own self-imposed limitations. Crappy time slots didn’t help, either.

When you’re a young actor, your reaction to a failure is egocentric: It’s me. It’s my fault. They didn’t like me. I guess I didn’t try hard enough…

Getting canceled after such a short burst can make an actor think that people only want you as a little spice and sizzle – not as the whole meal. But, after you’ve been around a while, you realize that it’s not all about you – you’re just a little cog in a larger set of wheels.

Whatever the reason, I was faced with my second failure in a row as a leading man of a TV series. The saving grace for me was feeling confident that on both Jack and Brisco really good work was done by all participants. Both shows have “aged” well in the eyes of the public and have since become “Cult TV” – a somehow fitting end.

GNOME, SWEET GNOME

Ida and I bought a very funky house, knowing that we could always “fix it up.” True vision must come from complete blindness, because we had no idea what we were getting into.

For starters, the house, if you could call it that, was essentially the shape of a Quonset hut, but not all aboveground – it was about half-submerged, with eighteen inches of dirt on the roof.

I personally had never lived in a Hobbit house, but there were many pluses. The arch was a very sound structure and allowed for open spaces within the home. Because of the dirt above, the hottest summer day had virtually no effect on the interior temperature, and the same applied to winter. A single wood-burning stove was sufficient to heat the entire house and there was no need for air-conditioning of any kind.

If you’re a noise freak and like peace and quiet, a dirt roof is for you. Ida and I have slept through numerous wind, rain and thunderstorm events because the natural insulation was such an effective barrier.

Having said that, the place was very cave-like. The lower level, mostly underground, swallowed light. It was not unusual to have two or three lights on at 1:00 in the afternoon. The curved shape is a square-footage cheater as well. Furniture can never be placed too near the wall, because you’d bang your head on the arched ceiling above you.

The eleven-hundred-square-foot house had been built ten years previously by an eccentric Englishwoman and she lived alone. In retrospect, the house was perfect for one person – one bathroom (if you exclude the “country” toilet in the pantry), one main bedroom that was attached to a small greenhouse, a very tiny second room and a mostly open upper floor, with the exception of cheesy cabinetry that blocked a million-dollar view out the windows.

There were no building codes in Oregon until the seventies, and it allowed for some odd results. Because there were so many hippies in my neck of the woods (and still are), there are many single pieces of property with six or seven habitable dwellings. Oregon locals are a hearty, self-sufficient bunch and they like to build their own garages, pour their own concrete and rewire their own electricity. Permits? Deal with that when you sell.

Our house was not a model of building code compliance. A lot of new age “Pioneering” had been done since the initial construction phase. By definition, I mean: work performed by unskilled laborers, whereby a proprietor hopes to save money but ultimately wastes even more in the end because the crappy work never lasts and has to be redone.

Evidence of Pioneering was everywhere in our house, from the keep-the-spirits-away quartz-laden wall in the greenhouse to the stove, which was attached via a bare copper tube to a barbecue-sized propane tank outside.

Every sink, faucet and showerhead had to be replaced – not so much to suit our tastes, but because they had become so calcified from the well water that they no longer functioned properly. Item by item, we began to rip out, replace and upgrade the house to the twentieth century.

GREEN ACRES, OREGON-STYLE

One of the more challenging projects was upgrading the telephone system. Two lines came into the house, with one jack upstairs and one down. In my world of home/ office, I needed a six-pair line installed to meet my immediate needs.

Easier said than done.

For the sake of technological reference, my valley was using telephone party lines up until the eighties. Getting extra lines in the Oregon backcountry wasn’t as easy as calling up the phone company and deciding whether it would be a morning installation or an evening one. Here is a letter I later sent, outlining the odyssey:

Dear US West,

Let’s turn back the calendar to May, 1998. I placed an order to add additional phone lines and voice mail. The installation was to be fulfilled approximately July 15th. Several days after that date, realizing that no US West phone company representative had shown up, I placed a call to a Customer Service Representative – let’s call him Leo – and asked why. The answer that came back was simple, yet astounding: “The area of concern utilized an ‘older’ system, and doesn’t provide the switching to connect a missed call to Voice Mail, or provide the additional lines that you need.”

“Leo” from the Home Office Consulting Center in Phoenix (very far from where I live) didn’t even know what systems were available in my quiet little valley before he placed the order.

Recommendation #1: Introduce the left hand to the right hand. Maybe throw a mixer.

Together with Leo, I formulated Plan B, which was simple but challenging: “Your company would dig a trench up the length of my property – seven-tenths of a mile – lay a shiny new six-pair line, and I would pay for it.”

Quick update:

The work was completed in January of this year. In case you don’t have a calendar handy, that’s nine months after the order was placed. I heard that there was a nasty little strike within your company during that time. Everything work out okay?

In June of this year, the sub-contractors returned to bury the remainder of the exposed cable. That was the good news. The bad news was that in the process they “stretched” it in one area and snapped the line.

Then there was the water thing.

After a temporary splice reconnected the phone line, the diligent trench-digging men scraped an old steel pipe several times. Undaunted by this, they continued their course until they hit the pipe again, this time severing it. To our mutual horror, this turned out to be the main water supply for approximately three families across the road.

Imagine the angry phone calls I got. You probably have a record of them somewhere.

Recommendation #2: Update The Trench Digger’s Guide to Trench Digging by encouraging diggers to “change course” when encountering “obstacles.”

Eventually, the severed line was repaired and all was well again in my happy valley – until I wanted to get call waiting. I lost count of how many times I was told “next day by six” or “tomorrow by noon for sure.”

A Customer Service Representative in Salt Lake City – let’s call her Doris – informed me that I would have to call Repairs if I wanted something done. I became perplexed: How can something be repaired if the service hasn’t even taken place?

Recommendation #3: Take Team Phoenix and Team Salt Lake to a US West corporate retreat for trust exercises and charades.